Paradise Regained
by Gatac
Summary: AU, follows "Rebuilt". The cracks start to show as Jaime struggles with being an augment. Meanwhile, Berkut investigates the death of a whole town and uncovers something monstrous. Technology, Tradecraft, Transhumanism - dark & gritty done right.
1. Chapter 1

Jaime Sommers woke up in her bed. She considered that a positive experience, because it meant that she had slept.

It was a cloudy Tuesday morning, with a distant sun casting twilight through the window blinds. Jaime rose from her bed, fully awake in an instant. Without thinking overly much, she grabbed the pistol off her nightstand and shoved it into the second drawer; the carrying bag found a temporary home under her bed. Jaime considered the tasks ahead and shivered.

Her phone rang with the unloved certainty of a brushfire after El Nino. Jaime would have preferred genuine grumpiness and sloth, but being "on", she could only offer an inauthentic recreation of the same. She reached under her bed, pulled out the cell phone - the business phone, too – and took the call.

"Good morning," Will's voice said. "Slept well?"

"Good morning to you, too," Jaime replied. "And yes. Until you woke me up."

"I don't think I did."

"You know I like to sleep in."

"And you know I can access your bionic systems through the phone."

Jaime raised an eyebrow. This was making too much sense for freaking 7 AM.

"Okay, got me there," she conceded. "Why are you calling?"

"Jonas wants you here today. Some basic training and paperwork. Bring your bag."

"Here?"

_Yes, that's right, Jaime, rephrase everything as a question. Only way you ever get told anything useful._

"Wolf Creek," Will said. "Should be in your mapping system."

"That's great." _Next question!_ "How do I use the mapping system?"

"…we really need to brief you properly."

"Yeah, no kidding."

"Hang on, I'll do it from here."

Within five seconds, Jaime's mind was swimming with the strong desire to drive North, nicely complemented by a down to a second of arc reading of North, both the geographical and the magnetical.

"See you," she managed to say, then hung up, dropped the phone and buried her face in her hands. The urge was still there, but subsiding slightly from the first intense rush. The voice that told her where to go had morphed from Drill Sergeant Nasty to a nagging kid, but it seemed like the more she learned about her new abilities, the less control she had.

_Shower time, _Jaime thought._ Showers fix everything._

---

"…Wood's case against the Department of Defense reached the Supreme Court yesterday," the news anchor said, a nice steady baritone straight off the teleprompter. "With the ongoing efforts to stabilize the situation in Iraq as well as the increased troop levels in Afghanistan, the controversy about recruiting restrictions imposed by the DoD continues unabated…"

Four hundred miles away, Becca Summers rolled her eyes at the clumsy automated closed captioning. Uhna baited, indeed.

"Morning," Jaime said as she walked in from the bathroom, already dressed for the day in jeans and a green sweater. Becca raised her hand in acknowledgement, but focused on the TV instead; for all the time she didn't spend on looking at the notepad in her hands, she might as well have participated in an experiment on automatic writing. After a minute, she turned the TV off and wandered into the kitchen, where Jaime was already in the process of assembling cream cheese bagels.

"Why were you watching the news?" Jaime asked; Becca shrugged.

"Maybe I care about the world we live in."

"Is that the answer to my question? I can't tell."

"Class assignment," Becca said. "Talk about something in the headlines and how it affects us all."

"The word headline implies a newspaper."

"Jaime, how many of my classmates read newspapers?"

"Point. I guess you could stretch the definition to cover websites, though."

"…how many of my teachers get their news from the net?"

"Point the second," Jaime said. "So you're looking for something everybody has heard of so that you can actually discuss it."

Becca nodded to that. Jaime glanced past her little sister at the lowest common denominator of information society and sighed.

"What did you pick?"

"Maria Wood," Becca said, in the tone of voice reserved for phrases like "IRS audit" and "colonoscopy".

"Ah," Jaime said, "the soldier. So, how does that affect us all?"

"Gender-integrated combat units, probably draft registration for girls."

"You sound…uh, enthusiastic is not the word I'm looking for."

"Meat for the grinder," Becca said. "I mean, seriously, there's so many things that need protesting, and all this woman wants is the right to be shot full of holes in whatever the current mess is. It's just twisted. You know what I've got here? I'm actually making a list of all the real news we're ignoring because of bullshit like this."

Jaime plunked a plate with two halves of a plain bagel – both liberally smothered in cream cheese – in front of Becca, nonchalantly pushing the notepad aside. For a second or five, Becca didn't know what to do with the pen in her hand, then laid it aside and grabbed some food.

"It's good to care," Jaime said, "but please don't make a scene in the classroom."

"Can't help it," Becca returned between bites, half talking, half signing. "The blood of the revolution flows in my veins."

"How often does the blood of the revolution need to be picked up from the principal's office?"

Becca fixed her big sister with a cream cheese-stained smile.

"You are such a square," she said.

"It's hip to be square," Jaime said.

"No," Becca replied, "no. It's not."

---

Jaime's first unassisted drive to Wolf Creek was relaxing, in a way, taking her further up the Pacific Coast before veering inland for another two hours, finally ending up on what should have, by all rights, been a well-worn dirt road through a dense redwood forest – and instead was a well-worn paved road through a dense redwood forest. One of the turns found her right in front of the main gate of a facility that didn't look all that interesting from outside: a wiremesh fence perimeter, a few small 60s buildings, the largest of which one might describe as a hangar only when feeling very charitable, and a helicopter landing pad seemingly built more as an afterthought to dispose of leftover asphalt. Jaime's doubts over whether she had found the right place were dispelled when the main gate opened for her; the sense of direction in her head urged her to drive forward and into the hangar.

The first evidence of actual life was found there, but it made up for the delayed entrance through quality: six Berkut guards, fully armed, stood watch inside the structure, but made no move to stop Jaime from anything. Much of the hangar was painted to indicate parking spaces, and at least a dozen were filled, most with nondescript SUVs. Nonplussed, Jaime parked her car in a free spot, grabbed her Berkut go-bag and climbed out of the car. Something scratched at her memories; she had done this in reverse twice yesterday, being escorted out of the underground base, but she couldn't recall the details of either. After the sharp clarity of the drive to this place, the fuzziness in her head felt slightly threatening.

So, what now?

After looking around for what seemed like half a second, Jaime decided to pick out the guard who looked least likely to kill her (notwithstanding the confident response of her system, insisting that she could take all of them and Thomas Calavera, ex-Army, Military Police, in particular) and walked towards him, the bag's shoulder strap digging a little into an inexplicably sore spot above her collarbone.

"Excuse me…" Jaime began, then caught his glare as Calavera's vision didn't so much move as swivel to center on her. "Hi. I'm new here. Where's the entrance?"

"Sommers, right? Where's your ID?" the he asked. His monotone wasn't very threatening, in Jaime's opinion.

"Don't have one yet. Mr. Jonas Bledsoe is expecting me."

Jaime recognized that speaking the word "Bledsoe" seemed to serve as a mythical invocation, capable of compelling incredible results – in this case, Calavera reached for his radio headset. Jaime felt a slight tingle in her head, but left the guard to his conversation.

"Ops, this is Calavera, over. – Got Jaime Sommers for you at the main entrance, over. – Copy that. Calavera over and out."

"So?" Jaime asked.

"Personnel elevator is over there," he said, pointing to a nondescript partition within the hangar. It looked like it might have been used as an officer once. "You'll want the first sublevel."

"Thank you," Jaime said, then hurried in the indicated direction.

The partition lost all indicators of office-ness when Jaime entered; just around the bend from the door stood the solid sliding doors to be expected of an elevator, opening to her approach. The inside felt vaguely 80s-ish, with faux wood paneling and square plastic buttons. She pressed the one for Sublevel Uno, closed her eyes and enjoyed the slight shuddering of the elevator as it began its descent. None of this felt familiar.

The elevator doors opened to the tune of a standard-issue pinging sound after a short ride. There was a straight hallway up ahead, leading to the main offices, as well as one to the left, slightly curving on itself. Jaime chose that and walked a few steps, focusing on some windows set into the inside of the curving metal tunnel; a glance revealed free space with a large steel structure a few meters away. She stepped closer the glass and got a good look.

The walkway was, as far as she could see, a circular path on top of a large, excavated cylinder, with a massive concrete plug on top. It stretched on for at least two hundred feet down. The metal structure in the middle stood as a spire, connected to other, lower rings with various walkways and trusses. It seemed like a curious method of constructing a facility, to say the least.

Soft footsteps approached from behind. Jaime couldn't place them quite yet, but they sounded…_male, cautious, not Will_. She pretended not to hear.

"Good morning," Bledsoe said. "I see you've found your way here, Mrs. Sommers."

"Good morning…Sir," Jaime said. "So, what about that paperwork?"

"That's first on the agenda, but not all of it." Bledsoe moved closer, taking up a position beside her at the window. "Nice view, isn't it?"

"Claustrophobic is more like it. Was this built as a missile silo or something?"

"This would be a horrible place for a missile silo," Bledsoe explained. "The geology is suboptimal, it's within striking range of SLBMs, and there's no rail access."

"…you're not going to tell me what it was," Jaime said, dryly.

"I can't tell you what I don't know, Mrs. Sommers."

Jaime stared into the well-illuminated void ahead. A place that kept secrets even from its master clearly wasn't going to answer all of her questions.

"Let's get the signing over with," she said.

---

The next ambush was already waiting for Jaime as she stepped out of Bledsoe's office; Will was standing right by the door, looking a bit anxious and generally worse for wear. Jaime knew the signs of an all-nighter when she saw them.

"There you are!" Will said. "The test results are in."

"Hug first," Jaime insisted; Will obliged, mumbling "Always with the hugs" in a not unappreciative manner. "So, what's the verdict, Doctor?" Jaime asked. "Did I pass?" She started walking back to the elevator; Will followed, easily keeping step.

"Looking good all across the board," he said. "On a complete unrelated note, have you had any auditory hallucinations?"

"Like your voice in my head?" Jaime asked teasingly.

"Sounds not caused by Bluetooth."

"It's great, by the way. I'm the first human headset."

"Don't sell yourself short, Jaime," Will said, "you're also a very good GPS receiver."

The elevator pinged open as they reached it; Jaime pressed the button for Sublevel Two, containing – according to the general plan next to the control panel – the training dojo, firing range and secondary armory.

"Ready for the range?" Will asked, nodding to Jaime's bag; she shifted it behind her back, a bit self-conscious about carrying a weapon.

"No. But I do want to get it over with."

"If you ask me-"

"Well, for once I'm not," Jaime said with a smile.

"Okay."

"No, sorry," Jaime said, honestly apologetic. "Go ahead."

"I kind of hated it, too."

"Any mishaps I should know about?"

"No," Will said, "I'm paranoid about everything I do on the firing range. I'm just not comfortable with it. I can't pick up a gun and forget that it's used to hurt people."

"At least you have an excuse," Jaime replied. "Where are you going?"

"Level 5. I need to catch up on some sleep."

---

Jaime's first foray into the second sublevel of the Berkut facility found her (after a few left turns) in what could perhaps best be described as the nave of a medium-sized cathedral, built into a cave. This area completely abandoned the ridiculously solid proofing of the main structure for a quick, concrete-sprayed cave, added way after the fact. As if to anticipate Jaime's sacral interpretation, the wall next to the entrance actually bore a fairly detailed crucifix. The other contents of the cave weren't very holy, though.

And most cathedrals wouldn't be home to a firing range.

Jae Kim was already waiting for her, wearing safety glasses and earmuffs; at his prompting, Jaime followed suit. She glanced down the range: 50 feet from the stand to the targets, with five firing lanes.

"You brought your carry?" Kim asked, nodding to the bag slung over Jaime's shoulder; she tapped the bag in response. "Where's your holster?"

"Didn't get one yet," Jaime responded. "I'd feel better without the gun, honestly."

"This is counter-terrorism, not superheroing," Kim said. "You cannot solve every problem with your fists."

"Doesn't mean I have to kill people, either."

"There's a difference between learning how to shoot and being trained to kill people, you'll see. You may put the bag down over there, by the way."

Jaime nodded and did as Kim asked. More compliance. Then again, she reflected, playing with firearms was one of those things that really should make everyone sit up straight and pay attention. Kim watched her dispassionately; when she was done, he pointed her towards one of the stands. There were a P226 and a loose magazine lying on top of the small table; Jaime was eager to get this over with, so she instinctively grabbed the pistol and pointed it downrange, getting a feel for its weight.

"Don't do that," Kim said. "You must check to see if the weapon is loaded before you handle it."

"Can't be," Jaime responded, echoing the certainty of her implants. "Gun's too light."

"I'm really glad we're starting out with snap caps."

Kim held up the magazine, and Jaime saw that it was filled with bright orange plastic pieces in the shape of cartridges.

"Does this change your judgment?" Kim asked.

"Plastic isn't nearly as dense as metal," Jaime said by way of justification. "I could tell if there was a real bullet in there."

"The difference between a real cartridge and a snap cap is less than four grams," he said. "Just because the system has reference data on this weapon does not mean that deviation from it, or adherence to it, is of significance. Guns rarely stay exactly the same weight in every model revision. Then there are after-market modifications. Who knows, this weapon might have lightened grips and a round chambered."

"So, ass, you, me?" Jaime said, feeling just a tiny bit sheepish.

"With firearms, it is in your best interest to be certain. Do a press check."

"Okay, how?"

"Reorient the weapon so the ejection port points upwards."

Jaime turned her wrist to the side. So, technically, the muzzle of a gun could be called a "port" for ejecting bullets, but there was an opening in the slide's side that fit the bill and Jaime deduced correctly that this was the intended object. The combination of feeling like knowing how to shoot the wings off a fly without actually having a firm grasp of basic terminology was not a good one. Jaime resolved to work on that, right along with the thousand other items on her list.

_Today's goal: get smarter, fast._

"Keep your finger off the trigger," Kim said.

"I knew that."

_Okay, what now? _Jaime thought. The whole enterprise looked suspiciously like the -90 degree rotational transformation as canonically applied to a one-handed firearm by your standard-issue urban malfeasant, with only her index finger resting outside the trigger guard as an attempt at gun safety.

"So, do I just-"

"Now, you should grab the slide at the front and pull it back just a bit – do you see the chamber?"

Cautiously, Jaime bent her right elbow, bringing the gun closer to her body. Her left hand reached out to grab the top of the pistol, then pulled it back. It took quite a bit more force than she thought it would. The inside of the pistol wasn't conveniently illuminated, but her eye adjusted easily.

"Yes," she said. "I can see it."

"Is it empty?"

No bullet inside. Jaime looked twice before letting the slide snap back forward.

"Yes."

"Then the weapon is clear," Kim said. "Every gun you pick up is loaded until you check it. It does not matter if you just put it down a minute ago or pulled it out of a safe, it is loaded until you make sure it isn't. Treat the weapon accordingly. Complacency breeds tragedy, more often than not."

"Okay," Jaime said, "easy enough. What else?"

"Pay attention to the hammer. When you do a press check, you should never pull the slide all the way back – that will cock the gun."

Jaime knew that the hammer was still uncocked before she saw it. _Bad habit_, she thought. _Check the weapon. Stop listening to the system for everything._

Kim nodded approvingly. "Aim the gun," he said. "Tell me what you see."

Jaime flipped the pistol back into the vertical and aimed down the sights. Without thinking, her stance shifted: her left foot slid until it was well separated from her right foot, her shoulders curved forward as she brought her weight towards the front, and her left arm came up, cupping her right hand from below. The target at the end of the stand received a new, bright red center as Jaime fixed her gun on it. With an experimental twist, she moved the pistol sideways a bit. The red bullseye on the target moved with it.

"What is that?" Jaime asked. "It's like a dot where I'm aiming."

"That is the intent," Kim said. "In a combat situation, you rarely have the chance to stand still and aim down your sights. The dot will allow you to point-shoot effectively from any position. You can even slave your arm to your eye, and it will automatically try to aim in the direction you're looking."

"And it's all in the system?"

"All in the system," Kim confirmed.

"Huh."

Jaime lowered the gun. The point followed briefly, but slipped out of her field of view and became an arrow at the edge. The further she lowered the weapon, the broader the arrow became; conversely, looking downward reeled the arrow in until she could see what she was aiming at again.

"This is like a video game," she said.

"I believe that was Nathan's inspiration," Kim replied, then shrugged. "I am not against it, if it works. Now, we will deal with loading the weapon…"

---

None of Wolf Creek's places deserved awards for interior decoration, but Bledsoe's office was constructed from a potent source of anti-Feng Shui. The omnipresent metal furniture – his desk specifically – would not agree with either the sumptuous leather on his office chair, nor the surprisingly old and ratty couch against the left wall, opposite the shelves for whatever paper files Bledsoe needed to be there. The lampshade was too big, too, making it seem like the ceiling hung even lower than it already did. The room had all the charm of a cramped fallout shelter.

That suited Jonas Bledsoe just fine.

He wouldn't show it around the people working for him, but he actually liked to relax every once in a while. Generally, that could be accomplished by just leaning back into his chair, the faint creaking of well-worn leather a primal acoustical signal to close his eyes and let his thoughts wander. Difficult cases could be treated by lying on the couch, but Bledsoe didn't care for that at the moment. He was in his chair – sitting straight up – and, very intently, studying data. So far, so normal: the latest batch of fractal intelligence from the NSA usually made for good, light reading, at least for someone as obsessed with unusual threats and risks as him. But this piece didn't look good.

In fact, the words "Unknown attack vector" and "200 civilian casualties" put together in one bullet point looked positively horrifying.


	2. Chapter 2

_Author's Notes:_ Happy 2009! Sorry that this has taken so long, I had a writing crunch on several other projects that took up my energy. And further apologies if this seems a bit disjointed, multiple storylines are vying for attention and demand some setup. I'll do my best to consolidate to a clearer A-B structure as this goes on.

---

William Anthros looked decidedly un-groomed as he shambled into the conference room, fashionably late to the hastily-called meeting. Powernap over lunch aside, he owed himself two nights worth of sleep, and the stubble on his face was a stroppy mess with the appearance and consistency of tumbleweed – strange how quickly the mere beginning of a beard could go out of control. The empty chair ahead looked like sweet salvation; he grabbed it by the backrest, spun it around and plonked himself down, perhaps a little too quickly. Pope ignored him, Bledsoe shot daggers from his eyes, and Truewell silently shoved a cup of black coffee over to him.

Since he'd spoken to Jaime…he didn't know what had happened to him. He'd just crashed.

"The situation is this," Bledsoe said, his point illustrated with a map of the continental United States projected onto the wall-mounted display. "We're looking at Paradise, Idaho. Population 216, standard issue small town. Guy named Zach Peters was the major, nice house, 3 kids. Five hours ago, Mr. Peters was calling his kindly old grandma – who also lived in Paradise – when she suddenly reported not feeling well. Before he knew it, he heard her die over the phone. He had enough time to dial 911 before he nearly did the same thing for the operator. EMTs got there, found dead people in the streets, they seriously freaked out. They got Peters out and whatever it is, they didn't die from it, so they called it in and asked for the cavalry. **Then** they died."

Jonas Bledsoe paused for effect. He really liked doing that.

"Peters is still hanging on, but so far he's the only survivor and probably won't make nightfall. We've got a National Guard unit on station now, and the Chemicals are sending a Rapid Response Team to figure out what the hell happened."

Will's eyes didn't agree with such a concentrated source of light, so he didn't look and instead focused on the cup in his hands. Too hot to drink, not nearly enough caffeine to make a difference.

"Where do we come in?" he asked, not really wanting to hear the answer.

"Officially, we don't," Bledsoe said. "Nobody's going to know anything until they can get samples tested, probably with a round trip to Aberdeen. And then, maybe, we might get marching orders. But that's hours – days we can't afford to lose if we want to stop the guys who did this."

"You think it's a terrorist attack?" Truewell asked.

"I have a hard time explaining it as anything else," Bledsoe replied. "Truewell, Anthros, you're going, wheels up in ten."

"What about Mendelson's debrief?" Truewell asked.

"I'll do it," Bledsoe said. "And Anthros?"

"Yes?"

"Bring some protective gear. Place might still be hot."

Will's eyes closed completely. It was just a bad day all around to be the guy with the chemistry set.

---

During long operations against drug runners in South America, Antonio Pope had picked up a talent vital to soldiers everywhere: the ability to rapidly adjust his body's activity level from rest to full alert and anywhere in between. Before even water and food, Pope would name sleep as a survival essential, and consequently he was quite adept at fashioning available materials and surfaces into cots suitable for resting. With business class in the redeye to DC severely underbooked, he had gotten the rest he needed to enjoy the view from the small transfer aircraft. The hop to Frederick Municipal Airport was a short one from there, leaving him barely enough time to change clothes. The airfield wasn't a stranger to military visitors; another Major in dress uniform didn't stick out.

The last leg of Pope's journey was by car, the standard-issue ominous black government sedan with a witless Army Corporal at the wheel. Fort Frederick wasn't far away, at least not far enough to let Pope consider getting bored. In accordance with his cover, Pope didn't spend any effort on socializing with the driver.

In assembling a team of very competent people and making them drop off the radar, Jonas Bledsoe had had to resort to the tactic of making them mortal. Pope, once a hotshot Special Forces operator, had therefore come down with a nasty stress-related disorder – the particulars of which it would have been impolite to discuss – that made him unsuited for further frontline duty; unsure what to do with him, the Army had therefore failed him upward, promoting him to Major and assigning him to a mostly ceremonial position at the National Center for Medical Intelligence. He was so far to the right on the org chart that he had neither staff nor responsibilities to speak of, other than filing quarterly reports on obscure medical facilities around the nation. It was, in fact, quite easy to forget that he even worked there.

Pope approached the director's office with a disdainful look on his face. The secretary nodded to him silently; nothing to do but step up to the door and knock.

"Come in," Colonel McCarthy said, a harsh baritone strong enough to punch people in the guts even through the door. Pope took the blow with his trademark composure and entered. With well-drilled rigidity, he closed the door behind him, then stepped up to McCarthy's desk and saluted his nominal superior officer. McCarthy returned the salute without getting up. Pope barely had time to sit down properly before the Colonel shoved a deskful of file folders at him.

"Is that all?" Pope asked, failing to be properly intimidated.

"Literally everything, Major. 10 years of Berkut doesn't add up to a lot. Short quarterlies, the usual incident reports…"

"I'll need those first."

"What are we looking for?"

"Everything about Sara Corvus," Pope replied before he grabbed a folder at random. It was a recent report – IARPA comments on foglet prototypes. Pope wondered how that had found its way here.

"Huh," McCarthy said, leaning back in his chair. "What about her?"

---

Sara Corvus weighed her options. Opposite her, the man stood ready to defend himself, wearing an ensemble of light protective gear. His stance was tight, almost completely withdrawn to absorb and deflect attacks. Corvus wasn't playing that game, though; her choice of tank top + training pants left her much more mobile, and her feet were loose, shifting across the ground as she read her opponent, a tiny dance of equally tiny adjustments. Somewhere in this space between them, there had to be an opening. All she had to do was find it, capitalize it before it disappeared back into the sea of possibilities.

The window of attack was 6 milliseconds wide. Piece of cake.

Corvus's fist shot forward, exploiting a gap in the man's coverage of his face; his head barely missed her fist as he shifted to the right, neatly avoiding her attack. Dozens of counters filled Corvus's consciousness as her implants adjusted to the new situation, but she did not press the attack; instead, she withdrew and stepped back, then circled the man slowly.

"That was fast," she said. "Spinal upgrade?"

"It's very useful," the man replied. Corvus smiled at the way he still couldn't quite nail the 'v' sound.

"We've got a new player," she said. "Her name is Jaime Summers. I didn't think Anthros would do it."

"You thought he'd be dead."

"That was Plan A."

"Getting Rolf killed, losing several weapons and wasting the advantage of surprise," the man said, "that was Plan B?"

"Look, Nick, like it or not, Berkut has another augment. If we can get her -" Corvus trailed off, then launched a quick kick against the man's leg. With a deft sidestep, he matched his shin with hers, blocking her attack before it could gather momentum. Corvus smiled, then continued. "Let me put it this way. I nearly killed her, they put her through the procedure, and she was fighting me less than 24 hours after the crash."

"That's new," he agreed.

"We need her," Corvus said. "She has to know me, she has to follow me when I show up. I don't like sacrificing people either, but it couldn't be helped."

---

The quaint little town of Paradise wasn't much more than a speck in the distance when Will and Truewell spotted the first checkpoint on the road ahead; Truewell went easy on the throttle of the company car. It hadn't been a long drive, what with the majority of their travel being airborne, but there was a grim tension to the trip that made it rather unenjoyable. Will wondered if he'd ever get to go on a proper road trip with his coworkers. Or Jaime. Yeah, on second thought, Will would've preferred two weeks trekking all over California with Jaime. He opened the glove compartment and removed a small bottle of tablets from his travel kit, together with a half-drunk bottle of water.

"You should take it easy on the painkillers," Truewell said, without taking her eyes off the road. "Four in the last hour."

"It's not codeine," Will replied. "Arm's almost done anyway, it's the dialysis I'm not looking forward to."

"What was that, then? You got a perverse taste in candy?"

"Uppers. After three days, I'm beyond coffee."

"You haven't found the right one," Truewell said. "But three days? You really should get some sleep."

"I'm okay," Will countered. "There's just a lot to do. Analyze telemetry, catch up on the latest developments in chemical weapons research, inspect a town full of dead people..."

"Still, this isn't healthy," Truewell said, then slowed the car to a rolling stop at the checkpoint. "Smile and say 'FEMA'."

The roadblock was a fairly simple setup: a tight slalom course of oil barrels, presumably weighted down somehow, with a small guardhouse built on the frame of a shipping container. Bumps further ahead on the road indicated remote-control spike strips or other, more exotic immobilization technology. Finally, an almost symbolic stretch of concertina wire was laid across the road beyond the slalom obstacle: just enough to discourage cars speeding through after the oil barrels. Will wondered how they would get trucks through.

There were three soldiers on station that Will could make out; one was standing in front of the wire, signing for Truewell to turn off the engine. He was dressed in a standard US Army Combat Uniform fatigues, with a light carrying vest and an unmodified M4 carbine slung over his shoulder. Another soldier – same gear configuration – was sitting behind another row of oil drums on something Will couldn't see. The third was inside the container, barely visible through a window.

Soldier Nr. 1 – his nametag identified him as "Larrimore" – stepped up to the driver's side of the car, his gentle Northwestern accent laced with casual boredom.

"Hello," he said. "This is a restricted area. I'll have to see some ID."

Truewell handed him two FEMA badges and a few sheets of faxed documents. Nothing like getting your signed marching orders handed to you when you step off the plane. "Doctors Truewell and Anthros, FEMA Disaster Operations. We need an update on the local situation –" Truewell stole a glance at his shoulders – "Sergeant."

"Sure," Larrimore replied, handing the badges back. "If you don't mind me saying, this is a clusterfuck. We've got the rest of my Guard unit, FBI terrorism response and Thureos guys all at the inner perimeter. Last I heard they're mounting a trip into town in the evening, no timetable yet. There's a Special Agent Brown in charge at the moment, you'll want to talk to him. We've got a Lakota and three Fire Scouts doing recon and perimeter security, but so far there's nothing moving in town or on the fringes. Oh, and we're shipping in vehicle-grade decon units later today, and I'm afraid we can't let anyone out until we've installed them. Set up containers for everyone, though, chow, beds, lab. Keep your windows closed from here on and don't stay outside too long, you know, standard end of the world drill. And…that about covers it, Ma'am."

"Thank you, Sergeant," Will said.

"Have a nice day, Ma'am, Sir. God knows we could all use it."

Larrimore stepped back from the window and signed for his partner to remove the wire obstacle; Truewell nodded to him one last time, then closed the window on her side, started the car and drove on.

"He's taking it well," Will said, looking back at the checkpoint.

"No, he's not. He knows way too much about what's going on, they radio in and check with their unit more than regularly. The chattiness, the gallows humor – defense. He doesn't want to be here."

"I don't want to be here."

"Nobody does," Truewell conceded. "There's a lot of stress going around. It's harder to make the right calls, there's indecision, tiredness, a hold-the-line mentality."

"You get careful when you work with weapons of mass destruction."

"Careful is good, timid is not."

---

Jaime's right hand was wrapped around the P226's grip, her index finger straight and resting next to the trigger guard. Her left hand supported her right from the side; she was slowly getting over the urge to have her left thumb way up next to the slide. Both of her arms were rigid at the elbows, a stable firing platform – which felt like a bit of a waste for Jaime, what with the certainty that she wouldn't be using live ammunition for at least a week. Mr. Kim was circling her much like a hyena, suspicious of every detail.

"Stance?" he asked.

"Isosceles stance," Jaime replied, trying to keep her breath steady. Front sight, front sight, front sight.

"Condition?"

"Condition 2, loaded and chambered."

"Go to condition 0."

Without swaying, Jaime's right thumb made for the hammer, then pulled it down to the sound of a single click.

"Condition 0," she said. Front sight, front sight…

"Tell me the four rules," Kim demanded.

"The gun is always loaded," Jaime rattled off. "Don't point the gun at something you're not willing to shoot. Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot. Be sure of your target and what's beyond it."

"Go back to condition 2."

Her thumb switched to the left side of the pistol, working the decocker. With another click, the hammer went back to its resting position.

"Make sure the gun does not sway while you work the controls," Kim said, still inspecting her. "Your point of aim mustn't wander."

"Got it."

"Unload the gun, we're done for today," Kim said; Jaime's stanced relaxed considerably. "So, how do you feel?"

"About the training?" Jaime asked. Her left hand eased downward and extracted the pistol's magazine in concert with her right thumb; she set it down on the bench in front of her. "I don't know. I never handled a gun before."

"You're doing just fine."

"I just thought – " Jaime's pinky finger found its way into the magazine well all by itself; with an easy rack of the slide, the final cartridge tumbled down, and she gingerly took hold of it and set it down on the bench, next to the magazine. "How are you guys ever going to teach me everything I need to know? And what do I need to know? I can't judge anything without an idea of what the curriculum is like."

"You should take that up with Jonas. What did you do about your sister?"

"Told her to bum a ride from a friend." Jaime decocked the now completely unloaded pistol and laid it onto the bench. Her right hand seemed reluctant to let go of it. "You call him Jonas?"

"Only when he's not listening," Kim said with a smile. "It might be better for your inner balance if you're not scared of him."

"That's good advice coming from a guy who could rip out my throat," Jaime said. Noting Kim's confusion, she added an incredulous stare to her expression. "Be nice until it's time not to be nice? Pain don't hurt?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"Oh my God," Jaime smiled. "I know what I'm getting you for Christmas."


	3. Chapter 3

Author's Notes: Here we go. If you haven't done so already, you might want to keep a Google tab open for this, acronyms and slang fly quick and heavy. And yes, there will be room for action scenes later on. So much infodumping, so little time...

---

There was still some sunlight when William Anthros and Ruth Truewell reached the forward operating post of the Paradise mission. The base was half tent city, half circled wagons – granted, with HEMTTs instead of more classical fare, but the overall effect was hard to shake. A small dirt road diverged from the main road into town; it made for as good a place as any to define as a safe distance from whatever had killed Paradise's population. Will estimated that they were about three miles away from the town proper, if that. Of course, owing to the small size of Paradise, that still didn't leave him with much to look at in the distance.

Their arrival was mildly overshadowed by the much louder entrance of the observation helicopter: a smooth machine with a rounded main body and a three-part tail assembly sailed downward onto a site well clear of the little fort. The landing zone wasn't pretty, just a flat and barren piece of ground demarcated by several large rocks spraypainted with a sickening, glowing green-yellow. In approaching this flagrant violation of Mother Nature's homely charm, the metal bird slowed both its descent and forward motion until it hovered right where X marked the spot. With the slowest of movements, it dropped out of what little sky it still clung to and hit the ground. As far as landings went, it was a soft one, without broken landing skids or other horrible material failures. Will flinched when he saw the wiggle between the ground and the skids – it invited thoughts of tolerances and margins, when what he really wanted to associate with flying was only the utmost precision.

While Will was therefore occupied with auto-traumatizing (though ably assisted by talented Army Aviators), Truewell had no time for gawking at military hardware. FEMA badge in hand, she stalked off in search of someone to impress. Her search didn't take long, as a fortuitous chain of events ejected several men in Army fatigues and a government spook from one of the many tents. Her eyes locked with the gaze of the agent, and she closed the distance. He was younger than her, though not by much: short-cropped hair, a middle-of-the-line dress shirt and tie under his dark blue FBI jacket.

"You must be Special Agent Brown," Truewell said, flashed her badge and shook his hand.

"Dr. Anthros?" he asked; she shook her head. "Truewell," she said. "Dr. Anthros is waiting at the car."

"Let's fix that." With the noise of the helicopter's engines spooling down covering their footsteps, the two of them made their way back to the company car. Brown reached into his jacket and retrieved a pair of sunglasses. More than any uniform, the fact that they weren't Oakleys marked Brown as _Not A Soldier_. "Sergeant Larrimore called ahead. Do you know anything about this that you feel like sharing with me?"

"Sorry, Agent Brown," Truewell replied, "I'm just here to assess the type of assistance needed. Dr. Anthros is the specialist; he should be able to help you with your investigation."

Will turned away from the spectacle at the landing site when he heard his name; he shook Brown's hand and cocked his head at one of the more elaborate tents.

"Is that where you're keeping the mayor?" he asked.

"Yes," Brown replied. "He's in a coma. Fleming's guys are doing their best to keep him stable, but from what I hear it's bad. They can only risk moving him straight to a proper hospital. One that isn't in fucking Texas."

"Fleming?" Truewell asked.

"Texas?" Will added.

"Captain of the National Guard unit," Brown said. He nodded to Will's question. "The problem is we've got the wrong people here. The Guard guys have some training, but they don't have the gear. The Rapid Response Team is three hours away and has been since lunch. The mayor should have been out of here by now, but I can't get the clearance to fly him out until somebody convinces them that the Paradise Bug isn't infectious. As it is, they'll only let him into a Level 4 facility. And that means Texas."

"Get me a phone," Truewell said. "Dr. Anthros, could you…"

Will nodded. "I'll take a look at him. What about the Thureus guys?"

"You won't see any of them here," Brown replied. "They're all running perimeter security, South and East."

---

The quarantine tent was such more by virtue of designation than any true containment certification. A smaller tent attached to the entrance served as the understudy for a proper airlock, and despite putting every bit of company rubber inside the tent and around Mayor Zachary Peters's bed, the tent's canvas construction would not – indeed, could not – be expected to seriously deter bad things from leaking out. It spoke to the troops' faith in their medic's opinion that this state of affairs was tolerated. Will stepped inside slowly, dressed in a heavy-duty overgarment, moon boots and a brand-spanking new full-face gas mask. The wisdom of Truewell's refusal to dress similarly and enter with him seemed more self-evident by the second.

The medic, by contrast, had already abandoned the NBC protection gear in favor of a surgical mask and regular latex gloves. He checked the IV bottle that hung over the mayor like the sword of Damocles; when he noticed Will, he gave him a nod and a greeting in a heavy monotone.

"Anything I can do for you, Sir?"

"I'm Dr. Anthros, FEMA Disaster Ops. I'm here to inspect the mayor."

"Thank God," the medic said with genuine relief. "We need to fly out Mayor Peters as soon as possible."

"Agent Brown mentioned that. My partner's already on the phone to make it happen. Can I take a look?"

"Step right up, Sir. You might want to take that gear off."

"Do you know what's killing him?"

"I'm not a 100% certain."

"…then I'm keeping the suit, if you don't mind," Will replied. He didn't notice the medic rolling his eyes. "Fill me in."

"Fixed pupils, leaking every body fluid imaginable, labored breathing."

Will walked over to the side of the bed and began his own quick series of diagnostics. Weak pulse, low blood pressure, spasming – and the medic wasn't kidding about the leaking either. Will added seeing a comatose man cry to his medical experience.

"Tears."

"Don't ask me how often I changed the sheets, Sir."

"Well, at the risk of stating the obvious, this looks like classic nerve agent exposure to me," Will said.

"That's what I'm treating him for, Sir. We found him in the ambulance with three autoinjectors already in him. I convinced Captain Fleming to let me use a couple of ours, too. But I'm running low and nobody's feeling like sending more, so unless we can get things moving we'll run out by ten. I already had to reduce the dose to stretch them and he's getting worse quick, so he's suffering and may die. If I go back up to what the manual says…one hour, and then he **will** die."

"Not good."

"And I'm not even sure I'm doing it right," the medic replied, sounding the opposite of convincing, "because he's barely alive, and from what we have seen here it really can't be nerve gas. We wired our chemical sensors to the Fire Scouts and took readings inside town, and they didn't trip on anything."

"That's weird," Will agreed. "You got here, what, three hours after the fact? To take out the whole town at the same time, it must have been airborne, a massive dose –the stuff that settled should still outgas something detectable."

"Frankly, Sir, I don't know. The sensors are supposed to ping on all Gs and Vs, and…they didn't. They can't all be broken, can they?"

"Okay," Will said, and moved to the other side of the bed. "Still, if the treatment works…maybe a different delivery system of some sort. Or maybe this is a different organophosphate through a vector we haven't considered. Your medicine problem – well, I brought a kit with me."

"So you've got…"

"Atropine and pralidoxime," Will said with a nod. "Do you have a blood sample from him?"

"I can draw one, but what's the use?"

Will smiled, though the mask over his face hid it well. "I also brought a lab," he said. "Stick him with another injector, I'll be back in a minute."

---

Ruth Truewell wasn't happy with how things were proceeding. Clouds over the horizon threatened wind and rain, and that was exactly what the town needed – both for uncontrollable dispersal of the threat and for washing away potential evidence. With her Berkut cellphone pressed against her right ear, she wandered around the company car and eyed the two plastic packages in the trunk with serious intent. If there was going to be an expedition into Paradise, it would have to happen soon.

"And I need background info on an FBI asset," Truewell said. "Special Agent Clayton Brown."

"Any particular suspicions?" Bledsoe replied; she could almost hear him nodding over the phone.

"Not yet, Sir, just getting a feel for the situation. Has there been any outside movement?"

"The DoD is saving up its competence for the media blackout, because that's truly a thing of beauty. I don't know how long they can keep it up, but we can enjoy it while it lasts. As for the Rapid Response Team…"

"Yes, we're waiting on them."

"Apparently, they're stuck in Colorado. Some mixup with the marching orders, and they're trying to extract a straight answer from the Department. You'll be lucky if they make it before midnight."

"That's –" Truewell sighed – "not the answer I was hoping for."

"I managed to get CBIRF tasked, though – when in doubt, send the Marines."

"ETA?"

"Two hours, they're already in Montana."

"Great, but it'll be dark by then. We're bleeding time."

"You've got a lab case and suits. The cleanup isn't your job, finding clues is. So you'll have to go in now, without them."

"If the National Guard unit will let us, Sir. I'll talk to Captain Fleming. "

The call had taken up all of Truewell's concentration, and she almost jumped when she saw Will – still clad in full NBC gear – rummage around the trunk of the car. She could hear his wheezing breath through the mask; though he strained to breathe properly, he wasn't hyperventilating. The heavy rubber gloves over his hands meant that he had no fine dexterity to speak of, but digging for a large carrying case beneath sealed packs of environmental suits didn't require that. The case was a sturdy affair, stainless steel with reinforced edges and corners, the kind of heavy-duty luggage one could conceivably use to store a backpack nuke. Will heaved it free of the trunk and set it down onto the ground; for a beat, he wanted to wipe the sweat off his brow with the back of his arm before he remembered that he was still wearing the full protective ensemble.

"This is not going to be fun," he said. "My money's on VX, sensors didn't go off but I suppose that could happen with National Guard issue. If that's it, then…it's bad, but it could be worse."

"How, exactly?" Truewell dared to ask.

"Dimethylmercury. Goes straight through most protective gear, the LD50 is too small to measure accurately, no effective treatment. My OrgChem professor had a horror story about this woman in New Hampshire…"

Truewell just nodded, and Will trailed off.

She watched him lug that beast of a box back to the quarantine tent and shook her head. The thought of hopping into one of those suits did not sit well with her at all. But at least she had finally seen Captain Fleming walking outside the command trailer, and a conversation where she held the cards would serve as a fine distraction.

Captain Fleming nodded to Truewell's approach. At 50 and balding – no grey to spoil his light brown hair, though – his career had reached and passed its natural apex. Right now, what he needed least was another busybody Fed stomping around the camp – and what was worse, this woman looked like she'd walk right through him without batting an eyelash. Fortunately, the radio set chose this moment to crackle with the familiar voice of Sergeant Larrimore.

"Sawdust, this is Sawdust Two-One, ready with our sitrep. Over."

Fleming suppressed a lopsided smile and grabbed the receiver; his thumb pressed the "transmit" button just as Truewell took her last step toward him.

"Yeah, uh, Sawdust Two-One, this is Sawdust Six, standing by to copy, over."

"Sawdust Six, sitrep follows: negative movement on perimeter, continuing surveillance. Running low on water. Over."

"Sawdust Two-One, this is Sawdust Six, copy sitrep. Sawdust Two-Three will relieve you at 1700 hours, over."

"Roger that, Sawdust Six. Sawdust Two-One out."

He put down the receiver and took a breath.

"I'm sorry, Captain," Truewell said, "but I need to take up some of your time."

"That's quite alright, Miss –"

"Doctor Truewell," she replied. He knew her name, of course, but she ignored the slight. "I need to investigate the zone."

"You're welcome to the footage of our cameras, Doctor," Fleming said with a dismissive wink and a nod toward another soldier hovering nearby. "Corporal Finster –"

"No," Truewell interrupted, "physically get into town."

"I barely have enough protective equipment to outfit my men. And it's a few gas masks and MOPP jackets, not what you need."

"We brought our own."

"Fair enough," Fleming replied. "Still won't happen. As I'm sure everyone keeps telling you, the RRT – you know, the experts – aren't here, and we're losing daylight."

"We're the experts, and if we don't go in now, we lose hours until sunrise tomorrow."

"It'll be dark by the time you're suited up and in town. Do you want to run around in a deadly environment with a flashlight?"

"If that's what it takes, yes, that's precisely what we're going to do. All I need is for you to let us do it."

Fleming rolled his eyes. Why did all the Feds have to remind him of his three year old daughter?

"Doctor Truewell," he said, sounding like the most patient man on Earth, "I'm responsible for the safety of everyone in this camp. I can't let you go in there without an escort, and even if I did allow you to go in alone, what would happen if there's some sort of emergency and you have to be evacuated? I need to be able to send my men wherever you go, and I can't send my men into the town center."

He turned his head and brought up his arm to point to the idling helicopter at the improvised landing pad.

"You want an overflight, okay. You want footage, sensor readouts, okay. But you're not walking into a hot zone."

Truewell fixed him with a glare. "Give me five minutes and I will have someone on the phone who will order you to let us go in."

"Then you'd better make that call, I'm not letting you do squat until there's someone on record saying it's your own damn fault." Fleming locked eyes with her, and there was a coldness in his gaze that surprised Berkut's chief psychologist. "You want to play like that, Doctor, be my guest. But in that case you're no longer my problem – do you understand?"

Truewell smiled. "Perfectly."

---

Jaime Sommers added another thirty seconds to the grand tally of lifetime spent waiting for elevator cabs; when the doors finally slid open in front of her, Jonas Bledsoe was already inside and gave her a neutral look. Jaime stepped into the cabin, with her back to Bledsoe, and watched the doors close. The elevator was rated for twelve people, but it felt rather small.

"I've got your temporary training schedule ready," Bledsoe said; Jaime turned to face him, expecting a piece of paper or a file folder or something to grab on to. "We can upload it now," he said.

_Oh, great_, Jaime thought, _more creepy voices in my head._

"Have you informed your sister about your new occupation?" he asked.

"You mean the cover job," Jaime said, "or the Secret Agent Girl one?"

Bledsoe smiled. Jaime decided she didn't like that.

"Neither," she added, after a moment's hesitation. "I didn't have the time to talk to her earlier today, I might float it when I get back…"

"Yes, about that. How did you solve the transportation problem?"

"She did. Told me she didn't need a ride today. I didn't exactly have time to investigate."

"Dr. Anthros told me you didn't know her cellphone number."

Jaime blinked. "Yes, but –"

"I'm just surprised," Bledsoe said nonchalantly, "your profile indicates that you're a more controlling type of personality. Are you slipping, Miss Sommers?"

That earned him a glare. "Can we not talk about this now?" she said, forcing her face back into a more careful expression.

"But you **are** worried about Becca."

"Of course I am; she's freaking 16."

"Then it looks like –" the elevator door pinged open behind Jaime –"you need to find a solution for that. Come on, I want to show you something."

They left the elevator on the third sublevel, as indicated by a sign outside, but it struck Jaime that she hadn't felt the air pressure change since entering the underground installation. Just one more thing in an endless list of loose ends to look into.

"We're heading for the operations center," Bledsoe explained. "You now have Secret clearance, by the way."

"That was fast."

"It wasn't easy, there was a lot of whining about background checks and your spotty personal history, not to mention your parents being peace protestors – and yes, some people in the chain **are** that petty –, but then I mentioned that you're the only one we have who can potentially stop Sara Corvus." Bledsoe allowed himself a small grin. "After that, the words 'expedite' and 'special circumstances' appeared in the conversation."

"So, the background checks –"

"- are still on, of course. The clearance is temporary until they can run you through the wringer properly. Fortunately, we already have several written expert opinions on your psychological and physical status courtesy of our staff, and the circumstances of your life don't permit any interviews with people outside of Berkut, per several agreements some people should have read more carefully. So, the way I see it, we just let them grind their teeth for a few weeks and then you're all set."

"It really shouldn't work this way," Jaime said, stopping when they reached a door. "I mean, that does basically give you carte blanche, doesn't it? The system's broken."

"The bigger the fence, the bigger the holes," Bledsoe replied, with just a hint of appreciation in his voice. "What were you expecting?"

The door slid open before them. The operations center wasn't larger than the conference room Jaime had visited the day before; it consisted chiefly of four metal desks with dual-screen computers, arranged like two stacked Vs with their point aimed at the entrance. A large, curved touchscreen surface was mounted in the room's center, currently displaying a map of Idaho. On second glance, Jaime noted that it wasn't just one map, but actually a composite of different datasets – high resolution survey maps, the latest shot from a spy satellite overflight, aerial reconnaissance pictures, several markers for important locations and GPS trackers. It looked…less fancy than she would have expected had she heard a description of it, mostly because there was very little user interface candy to it – no nice bevels, shadows or alpha shading, just hard edges and high-visibility fonts. The desks themselves were deserted except for one, a bit larger and with more legroom than the others – the close left one. Jaime wasn't surprised to find Nathan at the desk with a headset on, intently working on something on his computer.

"Ambrose," Bledsoe said, "update Miss Sommers. I'll be in my office if you need me."

Nathan tapped a few more keys, then turned around, gave Jaime a look and turned back to his computer. _Nathan Ambrose, huh?_ Jaime thought. The door closed behind her.

"Hey, Sommers," Nathan said. "Welcome to the Batcave."

"Hello," she began, and then she thought for a second before settling on "Ambrose."

"You wanna sit down for this? Yeah, you do, you want to sit down. Got a couple patches for you."

Jaime furrowed an eyebrow, but pulled up one of the chairs and sat down. "Could we maybe make a point of not treating me like a science fair project?" she said.

Nathan scoffed. "You're a freaking cyborg, Sommers. That's, basically, kind of a big deal. Anyway, this update will do you good, we'll hook you up with new data, disengage a few safeties, correct your neurochemicals…"

"What's wrong with my neurochemicals?"

"Something boring," Nathan replied, "ask your boyfriend. Bug list was sorta vague, you know, blunted affect, mild case of anterograde amnesia…"

"Oh, lack of emotions and memory loss. Let's fix that, yes."

"Knew you'd be into that."

Jaime waited for Nathan to get up. Then she waited some more.

"Uh, when are we going to start?"

"Already halfway done," Nathan replied, and smiled. "You know, we pioneered the whole wireless radio component with your system. Got full telemetry access, too, except we can't get video streaming working over the commercial cell network."

"Science fair," Jaime repeated.

"But it is pretty cool," Nathan insisted. "You like the navigation? Anthros made me switch it on today, it's got the works – GPS, magnetic sensors, dead reckoning through inertial. You'll never be lost again. Unless you go into space, in which case I gotta tell you: the celestial fix routine isn't quite there yet…"

"Science. Fair."

"Okay. Okay, you want something more relevant. Check this out."

Nathan tapped a key on his desk, and Jaime's world started swimming. The traditional folk remedy of clutching her forehead and moaning came easily to her, but within a few seconds the attack was over. Her vision focused to find more of the non-fancy computer elements, strewn all over the place. A very readable sign hovered over Nathan, divulging his name and a small stylized eagle head Jaime understood to be Berkut's symbol.

"Augmented freaking reality," Nathan said in response to Jaime's unspoken question. "Last generation technology, but I figured I'd show you it's still there to fall back on."

"This is what Corvus has?" Jaime asked.

"Yes. But as you can see, it really clutters up your field of vision, so you're rocking the new hotness that is memetic injection."

"So either I get pop-up ads in real life or voices in my head," Jaime replied sarcastically. "Great design."

"You'll get used to it," Nathan said. "Try working with it. It hijacks the nerve input on your artificial eye, so you just focus on the element you want to use –" Jaime looked at the label hovering over Nathan – "and double-blink." The nametag expanded into an extended dossier of Nathan, scrolling automatically as Jaime's gaze hit the lower bound of her field of vision. "I know," he said, "awkward at first. You'll –"

"– get used to it," Jaime said. "Can I have my voices back, please?"

Nathan tapped a few more keys. He made the science! look easy. "Done and done. Just tell me if you need any more of that service mode magic done."

"Can I do this by myself?"

"Ah, young grasshopper, not ready for this you are."

"Disgrammatism will get you nowhere," she said. "So…"

"Ask Kim, he's got a meditation technique for that."

For what wouldn't be the last time, Jaime fixed Nathan with a look of total disbelief.

"Mediatation technique," she managed to say.

"See," Nathan said, "the fix is working already."

"Confusion is not an emotion, Ambrose."

"I'm not trying to mess with you, Sommers. Seriously, it works through biofeedback, consciousness hacking, altered states –"

"– that was a movie," Jaime said.

"About consciousness hacking," Nathan said defensively. "I mean, I could talk about this for hours."

"It feels like you already have."

"I see we still need to work on the crabbiness. Anyway, you got your training schedule all loaded up?"

_Wednesday: 10 AM Weapons Drill. 12PM Lunch. 1__PM Introduction to Fieldcraft. 3PM Close Combat Drill. 5PM Weapons Drill. Thursday: 10AM Close Combat Drill. 12PM Lunch yes thank you very much that will be all._

"Got it," Jaime said, then rose from her seat. "Guess I'll see you around."

"Sure. Oh, little tip…"

"I'm listening."

"The next time you've got Corvus at gunpoint," Nathan said, "shoot her first."


	4. Chapter 4

Author's Notes: Here's a tip for aspiring writers - don't base your story on chemical weapons. Happiness will forever evade your grasp. As usual, it's probably a good idea to have a Google tab open.

---

Will stepped into the quarantine tent, a heavy breath from his lungs forcing its way to sweet freedom through the gas mask's exhalation valve. His toes were starting to itch from the sweating, and the first thing he had planned for after taking the suit off was drinking a whole bottle of water, but he'd been through worse than spending twenty minutes under full NBC protection.

Not much worse, mind you.

The medic had pulled down the surgical mask over his face to have a drink; it was, perhaps, Will's own thirst that led him to idle speculation about whether the thusly-revealed mustache was still within regulations. Grooming standards were about more than just keeping up appearances; some facial real estate really needed to be as smooth as possible to form a tight seal with the gas mask. Of course, on reflection, Will's stubble wasn't much better. So his second action after taking off the suit was going to be a close shave.

_First rule of chemical warfare_, Will thought, _beards kill_.

He set the heavy steel case onto a nearby collapsible table and snapped the locks open. The case was neatly separated into two components: the emergency supplies on top, all strapped into the lid, were made up of various drugs and chemicals plus a vacuum-sealed gas mask and plastic poncho; the other two thirds of the case's volume were taken up by a large, metal-cased monstrosity, all smooth aluminum plating, various small displays and adhesive plastic seals over a dizzying variety of input ports.

"Do you have the blood sample?" Will asked; the medic grabbed a small vial from an instrument tray, wound up his arm for a low toss in Will's direction, then thought better of it and closed the distance.

Will had managed to get the displays lit up and one port cleared when the medic handed him the sample. Of course, it was the wrong port, too small for the vial to fit; Will's reaction to this earth-shattering revelation was to tear open the next-larger port with no further comment. That one worked, so he pressed a few buttons and let the machine do the work. The medic fondled a freshly-spent autoinjector absent-mindedly.

But Will wasn't done. His rubber-gloved fingers dug into the small compartments of the case lid until they freed an IV bag from its storage pouch. The force needed to do so with the gloves on wasn't quite trivial, which made Will extra careful for the seconds it took to hand the bag to the medic.

"Atropine sulfate," Will said. "Put him on this, start with –" he took a glance at the mayor – "you just dosed him."

"You said to," the medic replied, "Sir."

"Before or after you took the blood sample?"

"Before."

"Okay," Will said with a twang of exhaustion. "Hook it up, don't start it yet. I really hope we've flushed the worst of it for now, but if he starts slipping back, begin with 1 mg per hour and watch it for 10 minutes. If he's still secreting, double the dose. Do that until he's dry, then keep the dose constant. The bag should be enough for at least three hours. Do you have any sterile water?"

"Sure," the medic replied.

"Then we could use these," Will said, fumbling for a handful of small vials in the case. "Worst case scenario." Finally, the medic took pity on him, walked over to the case and pulled them out.

"You know, Sir," the medic said, "you should really take that suit off." He held the vials against the light, read the label and shrugged. Pralidoxime, it said.

"The analysis is almost done," Will replied. He really wished he could wipe the sweat off his forehead. "Just another minute."

"How much water do we need for these?" the medic asked, pointing to the vials.

"How much you got?" Will asked.

"Most of two bottles, I think it's about 350, maybe 400 milliliters left."

"Okay, we need 100 per vial and another IV bag. Prep it, but don't administer it unless I tell you. He's probably gotten enough of a dose already – but it's good to have insurance."

The portable lab gave a very dissatisfying beep to inform Will of its completed analysis. _Hooray for microfluidic LOCs_, he thought. _Top of the class in chemical analysis, and then I go and build a machine that goes ding when there's stuff._

"Yep, still has some knocked-out acetylcholinesterase," Will said. "Nerve agent, now we have it in writing. Well, on a screen."

"Good news to me, Sir," the medic said. "So we can get the mayor flown out."

"If it's not too late," Will said. "Hang on."

Will grabbed the gas mask on his head by the mouthpiece and yanked it upward. Fresh air seemed to blow away the sweat on his face almost instantly. He took a few deep breaths and tried to clear salty liquid from his eyes. He stole a glance at the comatose mayor. His chances weren't anything to write home about, but given that he'd survived this long without a trip to an Intensive Care Unit…

"Organophosphate poisoning is an angry beast," Will said, still rubbing his eyes, "and we're poking it with sticks. I really want to get Peters into a lab and find out what keeps him alive."

"Should I wait a couple minutes before I start the IV?" the medic asked. On seeing Will react with a nod, he shrugged. "I'll need the time to prepare the other bag, anyway."

"Well, if you don't mind, I got some people waiting outside for the good news," Will said with a smile. The medic returned it, then went back to work.

Will enjoyed the relief for a few more seconds, then walked out of the tent. He never did ask for the medic's name. He had much bigger problems.

---

Becca entered her home to the expected silence. The oral report she'd built up in her head as her little moment in the spotlight had come and gone without incident. "Questions?" she had said at the end, just like every other kid standing in front of the class with too many notes on little pieces of stiff paper, and then there were no questions, just a polite "Thank you" from Mr. Deltree. The same look from the few kids who were looking at her: You don't ask us, we don't ask you, it'll go faster this way.

She concluded that the assignment sucked.

She stepped into her room and dumped the backpack onto her bed. The almost empty water bottle in the side pocket had to go; after a week of refilling it from the school's water fountains, the aftertaste in it had gotten fairly noticeable. Becca dumped it into the trash can next to her desk and continued on to the backpack's main compartment. The netbook in the back was playing the part of dead weight this week; it seemed like Becca just couldn't catch a quiet moment to sit down with it. Mr. Merchant's soldering iron – probably old enough to have long forgotten the box it came in – was next, in a plastic bag on top of her other stuff. Technically speaking, she had some more assignments to do for tomorrow, but the urge to procrastinate was persistent. She'd just work after dinner: everything got done on time, one way or another.

Becca took the time to have a look around her room. There wasn't anything wrong with it that a minute of shuffling things around wouldn't fix, well, except for the pyramid of soda cans – she had a few empty ones on her desk that needed cleaning before they could be added to the larger context of her living art project. The walls were still disappointingly bare, and she had to fill the room somehow. Her stomach growled in agreement with the word "fill".

Right. Dinner.

She made her way into the kitchen and tried to figure out what she should eat. There were some leftovers from yesterday, but truth be told Becca considered William Anthros's cooking skills to fall rather short of her big sister's opinion on the same. The noodles were too greasy, the sauce congealed from spending a day in the freezer, and the less said about the decidedly overdone bell pepper note in his ragout, the better.

She closed the fridge. Maybe the answer to her culinary woes was ordering some Thai, but her train of thought jumped the tracks when her eyes locked onto a picture Blu-Tack'd to a wall tile. It was one of these "self-portrait by outstretched arm" photos, with Jaime and Becca in front of the California/Nevada state line at Lake Tahoe. The longer Becca stared at it, the more fake Jaime's broad grin looked.

Becca wondered when she'd be caught showing her teeth on camera.

---

Sometimes, Jonas Bledsoe regretted drilling his employees to be mindful of time-critical tasks and waste as little time as possible.

Talking to a showering Dr. Anthros was one of those times.

The splatter of water on plastic echoed through the cellphone connection and was lovingly rendered by the speakers in the command center. Bledsoe stood in the middle, his arms folded in front of his chest. Nathan Ambrose sat at his desk, leaning back in his chair; Jae Kim stood beside him and pointed to the screen.

"Do we really need a waveform display of the shower's sound?" Kim asked in a hushed tone.

"It looks cool," Nathan replied tersely. After a moment, he added "Shut up."

"A little certainty would be helpful, Dr. Anthros," Bledsoe said, his voice easily overpowering anything short of a street riot.

"Yes, it would be," Will replied, clearly shouting at a distant phone. "If I could get a blood sample to my lab, I could probably tell you for sure. But with the equipment here, I'm about…80%, give or take, well – maybe 75% sure he's got traces of anthrocytes in his blood."

"See, that's the stuff that interests me. How'd they get there?"

"That's the thing. I'm not sure if anthrocytes were used as a delivery system, if they were present for other reasons –"

"You think he could be an augment?"

"Let me finish. There's a significant chance that my results are simply wrong, just like I said, the portable lab has been known to give some bizarre readings. And we have to consider production capability, or lack thereof. It's a no go either way, a practical impossibility to manufacture that many anthrocytes or that much VX without us noticing. You know how careful we are with our tech, and VX is one of the most controlled substances on the planet. And to cap it all off –" Will said, then was heard to ask Truewell for a towel – "to cap it off, we have a sample size of one. For all I know, whatever's in Peters's system isn't what actually killed the rest of the town. Even after all the aerial surveillance we can't be sure that it got everyone. We're just working with way, way, **way** too many assumptions right now."

"I hear you," Bledsoe said. "The mission hasn't changed. Suit up, get into town, investigate. Start with Peters's house. Now, put Truewell back on."

---

Jaime had half the commute back to her home behind her, hitting the stretch of the Shoreline Highway – a misnomer on the Highway part, at the very least - that went past Tomales Bay. Now that she had the route all figured out and was willing to hit and surpass the speed limit (just to match traffic flow, of course), she could budget less time to get to and from Wolf Creek, but it still wasn't what she'd gladly accept as a daily drive. The talk with Becca she had avoided yesterday was coming due once more, with renewed vigor. And if that training schedule was supposed to work out – to say nothing of actually being on duty – she would have to leave her little sister alone for days at a time.

Jaime was emphatically not looking forward to actually telling Becca that.

A glance at her car's fuel gauge told Jaime that making it back to the bay was in the cards, but that didn't include getting home. As if to complement the momentary glance of the important, the thought that there was a gas station up ahead in Point Reyes Station was carefully spliced into the tapestry of her consciousness. Jaime wondered if her next romantic evening with Will would yield a knowledgeable assessment of his wine choice.

A few minutes later, Jaime slowed and turned onto the plot of the gas station, stopping her car next to an unoccupied fuel pump. It was now that Jaime consciously noticed the gray panel van that had been just behind her since she had gotten onto the main road from Wolf Creek's rather more adventurous route. Okay, so there hadn't been much occasion to notice it beforehand, just a regular part of traffic going down the only big road in the vicinity, but the way it had followed her and then driven right past the pumps to park next to the vacuum cleaners made Jaime nervous. Maybe, she reasoned, playing chicken with them would work. _Just stay in the car,_ Jaime thought, _either they'll get out first, or they don't and you know they're fishy._

_Or maybe that will spook them. Hey, head-voice, advice?_

Jaime closed her eyes and counted to five. Then, she grabbed her Berkut bag and got out of the car. A glance at the van offered no movement; she walked around her car, opened the fuel filler flap and unscrewed the cap. With a well-practiced grab, she snatched a nozzle from the pump, pushed it into her car and set to swiping her credit card. The bag – loaded gun inside – weighed weirdly on her right shoulder as she fumbled for her wallet, finally producing her card. Her eyes darted to the van as often as she dared to, but detected no menace. Still, Jaime wasn't feeling safe. The pump station sprung to life, refilling her car's gas tank. With another glance at the van, Jaime took off towards the station's restrooms. The gas station lot was mostly empty – the attendant inside with a newspaper, a couple in their car getting ready to take off, a businessman fighting with his cell phone. On her way to the restroom building, Jaime spotted a small window that would let her watch the lot from inside.

Perfect.

The ladies' room looked like it had convinced many tourists to hold it in a while longer. Jaime didn't care about the facilities as such; she simply crouched down to check beneath the stall doors for occupants, did not find any, and hurried to the window. She pulled herself up with her new arm and looked outside. After a few seconds, the van's side door opened; two men climbed out, both dressed in nondescript, dark clothing. Jaime mentally labeled them Mr. Blonde and Emobangs, though precisely what that said about her opinions on Tarantino and post-hardcore music would, perhaps, never be discovered. The interior of the van, however, was arguably the more interesting glimpse: computers, rack-mounted hardware with a serious case of blinkenlights, and a few screens. Jaime didn't know what it meant, but it wasn't good.

For a few seconds, it looked like the men would just stand around there, though one of them made gestures towards her car. Jaime's urge to keep them away from it was answered, in a way, when Mr. Blonde locked eyes with her. And Jaime knew that had happened because they both started moving towards the restrooms. At that stage, letting go and ducking away from the window was an understandable yet mostly useless reaction on Jaime's part.

_Get out? Only one exit.__ Who are these guys? Is it so much to ask to have enemies with easily identifiable uniforms? Hang on, maybe they're not even my enemies, or after me at all. I have a gun but I can't shoot them, it's public and I haven't fired a gun ever and oh God if I have to actually shoot someone I swear I'm going to the cops and then I'll tell them everything and…_

_Maybe I can punch them. Maybe that's okay._

With the fleet thinking of desperation, Jaime opened one of the toilet stalls and closed the door behind her. The door was too high off the ground to make a credible hiding attempt by crouching on the toilet itself; the only possibility was to squeeze herself into the space right behind the stall door, as far off the ground as possible, and pray that they wouldn't want to escalate the situation by breaking down the stall doors. Jaime leaned against the stall partition, the door just to her right; she drew her right leg up until her heel touched her rear, then set that foot against the partition and grabbed the upper edge of the stall door with her hand. In a quick move, she raised her left leg, dangling for the fraction of a second before she managed to put it against the partition opposite her and stabilize her position. Compared to getting into this position, using it to climb up a few more inches with a chimneying motion was almost laughably easy. As a result, Jaime had her back curled down as far as possible to not stick out over the top edge, and her arms against her body, leaning slightly against the door to keep from being unbalanced. It wasn't a very comfortable position, but it did the job.

She heard the door creak, and the footsteps of what she presumed to be Mr. Blonde and Emobangs. She could sense the confusion even without spoken words, could hear them move through the room. In an instant, she became aware that her gambit wouldn't hold them off.

Time for egress.

In one smooth motion, her arms sprang to life, clutching the upper edge of the stall door; the energy coiled into her right leg was released, and she vaulted over the partition, right past Mr. Blonde searching the last corner of the room. Before Emobangs could react, she hit the ground and rolled past him, then darted for the exit. The beginning of a shout rose in Mr. Blonde's throat just as she reached the door, pulled it open and rushed out. Her car was dead ahead, and she slowed to a normal walk again, just in time to not be noticed by the few civilians. With a casual stroll (and her heart breaking 150 bpm), she closed the distance, removed the nozzle, then replaced the cap and closed the filler flap. Her two pursuers were still at the door to the ladies' room when she walked around her car; she stopped briefly and locked eyes with Mr. Blonde, then tapped her Berkut bag once. With no response from the men, she got into her car, started the engine and drove off, homeward bound.

The van didn't follow her.


	5. Chapter 5

Author's Notes: Heya, everyone! I hope that my promises of future action are still being believed. Oh, the troubles of slow burn. I suspect this story will look much better when it's all done and can be read in one piece. Kinda like watching Lost on DVD. Fairly light on the babble today, but you'll probably want Google open, as usual. (If you have understood everything so far without resorting to looking it up, you must be Tom Clancy.)

---

The road into Paradise was a surprisingly uncluttered venue; not all that much traffic on a Tuesday noon. Truewell counted two cars at the side of the road – one had evidently been brought to a sliding stop, with the driver nowhere to be seen. Another car had simply hit the ditch at an awkward angle and flipped onto its side. Truewell steered the rental car past both of the wrecks; the town just ahead was far more interesting.

"You see everything okay?" Will asked from the passenger's seat; Truewell nodded, and the full-face mask followed. His voice was muffled in a way closely resembling the effect of talking into a tea cup.

"It's better than I thought it would be," she replied, her voice distorted likewise.

Neither of them wanted to waste air.

Their getup was the deluxe version of what Will had worn to the quarantine tent: instead of relying on the drawstrings, all gloves, boots and zippers were secured with duck tape. The side mount of the mask led to an electronic valve system on the back, switchable from main supply (a large pressurized air tank) to a smaller "escape bottle". Various pouches distributed over the torso held other gear; the largest, sitting on the left hip, contained a simple gas mask and two sealed filter cartridges. The entire shebang was fastened to a carrying vest and thereby quickly proving itself to be absolutely horrible for sitting or crouching or lying or moving around in.

It was just a few seconds after getting past the town sign that Truewell had to first suppress the urge to rip the gear off and find a place to deposit her lunch. At least a dozen bodies littered the street, none of them looking like they had had the privilege of dying quietly. A woman in a service overall still dangled from a telephone pole by her safety line, a track of sun-dried vomit all along one of her sleeves – and continued down a few more feet of pole. Truewell brought the car to a stop.

"Do you need a moment?" Will asked.

"Yes," Truewell replied, then turned the ignition off. They sat in the car, and as the engine noise disappeared, so did everything but their heavy breathing. "I think I'm afraid of getting out of the car," she said with a flat voice.

"Most people wouldn't just admit that."

"Fear is a survival adaption," she said, "because it warns you when you're about to do something stupid."

"It doesn't get much dumber than walking into a hot zone just before nightfall," Will replied.

"Let's just get this over with, then."

Will nodded his assent and began to pat down his carrying vest for a quick equipment drill. Truewell followed his lead.

"GPS, check," he began, bringing the little PDA device out of standby and confirming that it read their current location. "Flashlight, check. Spare batteries, check. Air supply – " he glanced at the meter mounted on his right arm – "check. Radio…uh, repeat the frequencies."

"Channel 1, one-six-three megahertz, goes to Captain Fleming's guard unit. Channel 2, one-seven-one megahertz, goes to the cellphone repeater in the car."

"Check," Will replied, then brought the radio to life. "Sawdust 6, this is Eagle 2, do you copy? Over."

"Roger that, Eagle 2," came an unfamiliar voice, "Sawdust 6 here, good copy. Over."

"Uh," Will said, "I wanted, uh, the other Sawdust 6. Please identify yourself. Over."

"This **is** Sawdust 6," the voice insisted. "Eagle 2, I think you want Sawdust 6 Actual, over."

"Yes, sorry. My mistake. Put me through to Sawdust 6 Actual, then. Uh, over."

"Eagle 2, hold for Actual, over."

Will turned to Truewell. Their masks hid each of their attempts to keep a straight face.

"Where exactly did you learn radio protocol?" Truewell asked.

"Pope explained it to me over a beer," he replied.

"You should have bought him another round," she said, forcing a smile into her voice.

"Hah," Will exclaimed, then paused for a moment. "Yeah, should have."

The levity left as quickly as it had arrived.

"You want me to handle comms?" she asked.

"If you don't mind. I've got my work cut out with the investigation, anyway."

The sun was low over the horizon when they finally got out of the car. Paradise's main street stretched before them, with the town's major intersection just ahead. The town core was made up of small businesses, all of them still running on automatic – doors, lights, even some radios. Even that forced cheer couldn't make up for the utter lack of engines, chatter and footsteps. Truewell felt a little better after the first few steps. Maybe getting out of the car had done it; maybe it was just having had more time to adjust to the situation.

"Eagle 2," Will's radio crackled with Fleming's voice, "this is Sawdust 6 Actual. What's your status? Over." He reached for the send button, but Truewell beat him to it.

"Sawdust 6, this is Eagle 1," she coughed, then found her voice. "Eagles are in position and starting the search now. Next check in fifteen minutes, over."

"Copy that, Eagle 1. I've put Agent Brown on the circuit, he answers to Eagle 3. He wants to be informed when you find something. Oh, and don't spook my Corporal again, over."

"Wilco, Sawdust," Truewell said. "Eagle 1 over and out."

The sun was in Will's eyes, and for a second he brought up his arm to cover his face. He was staring back westwards, at the road they'd come on, and in retrospect he really should have seen that coming: hovering just over the horizon, the sun was in swift retreat, content to let the night take center stage. As awe-inspiring a spectacle as that was, from a sense of wonder perspective, it did not fail to give Will a better appreciation for what light remained.

"We should make a note of where we parked," he said, already adding a waypoint to his GPS. Truewell silently did the same. "Did Fleming tell you where the Mayor's house is?"

"No, he didn't," Truewell said, "but it was in the briefing. It should be right down the street here, maybe three hundred feet. Do you see anything yet?"

Averting his gaze from the road out of town, Will's eyes swept the storefronts close to him. A DVD rental shop, a small convenience store and a hairdresser's shop all stood in a formation he would have called a block in a big city; neither of them had bodies outside, but he had little doubt they'd find some inside. Something above the entrance to the convenience store caught his eye; he squinted and held his hand beside the lenses of his mask to shield them from the glare.

"Camera," Will pointed out, "there's a security camera on that storefront."

"Let's check it," Truewell said.

The two strolled off together, Truewell focused on the entrance, Will's head swiveling from side to side looking for other things to investigate. A near-whispered "My God…" brought his attention back front and center.

"What is it?" he asked.

A body rested against the sliding doors of the convenience store from the inside; Will's steps around Truewell to look at the corpse brought him close enough to the door's sensor to trigger it, and the entrance slid open, with the body simply dropping onto the floor. Finally, a pleasant chime to greet Will sounded.

"I'll be frank with you, Dr. Anthros," Truewell said, "this doesn't help my anxiety at all."

"If I said that we'll find a lot more like that and that you'll have to tough it out…"

"…wouldn't help, at all."

Will sighed. "Psychologist, therapy thyself."

"It's not the bodies, it's how they died," Truewell admitted. "Okay, distract me. What are we looking for inside?"

"You can go look for the security system, I'll deal with the bodies."

"Right. I'll be in the back."

Truewell noted the full shelves of the store as if that detail was important; her brain kept pinging on all the impressions that told it to expect a living, breathing town, as if hell had come to Paradise and done a spectacularly untidy job of it. Past the magazine rack, the stocks of candy and sweets next to the register and two more bodies between the small aisles, she fought her way behind the counter and into the "Employee only" room. Another corpse, an old Latino male, was crouched beneath the sturdy desk against the wall.

_Duck & cover_, Truewell thought.

Besides ledgers and a half-eaten bar of almond chocolate, the desk held a small TV and a VCR. The TV's picture from the camera's perspective was frozen, with only the timestamp in the upper right corner refreshing every five seconds. The VCR below was still whirring, recording those stills with the unthinking tenacity of a machine. Truewell stopped the tape and hit the rewind button. It took her a few seconds to go back through those last few hours, with their arrival a few minutes ago the only movement on the camera since lunchtime. Finally, she found a section with people in it and pressed play.

They were panicking.

In five-second stills, she saw people outside stumble into the store, even those short bursts of insight into their movement looking stilted and painful. If they had figured out that it was something in the air, getting inside might have seemed like a good idea. But they didn't know that they were already dead…

Truewell sat down onto the chair and took a few deep breaths. The flapping motion of the exhaust valve on her mask echoed through her head like a firecracker going off in a lunchbox. Her eyes shot to the supply meter attached to her right forearm. 90 minutes, it said, in a cheerfully fake pretense of reliable accuracy. 90 minutes until her air supply would run out. Sure, she carried filters with her, on the not-so-unreasonable theory that they might make the air around her breathable, but what if the concentration was too high for it to work properly? No, they'd have to be out of Paradise by then. Probably much sooner, to have a safety factor. In a way, that helped. It put an expiration date on her fears.

_This is silly_, she thought, then rewound the tape a bit further. Knowing exactly what was happening to her was unsettling, but it drove her mind to the matter of Anthros: perhaps he was taking this too well. Perhaps she was just making excuses for herself.

And then, there it was. She didn't consciously register it, but something made her stop and play the tape; after a minute, she saw it. The camera, barely catching the main intersection at the edge of its vision, had caught a tanker stopping right on the intersection. She watched this unfocussed presence sitting there for at least a minute before driving off, but this wasn't much more than an incidental clue, at best: the angle, distance and quality of the picture swallowed all details required to identify the truck; worse, the black & white picture didn't even give her a color to work with. And with the means at her disposal, even the limited magic of video processing would have to wait until she could physically get the tape to Berkut. Reaching into the carrying gear, she wrestled a large evidence bag from one of the zillion pouches on her vest and placed the videotape in it. After a quick look around to make sure she hadn't forgotten anything, Truewell rose from the chair and hurried back into the store proper.

"Got something!" she shouted through her mask before she could see Will; he rose from behind an aisle, his quizzical look piercing the eyelenses of his breathing apparatus with ease. "Go to 2, I need to phone home with this."

"Got it," Will said, switching his radio to the second frequency.

---

Jaime entered her apartment to a complete lack of fanfare, her ears primed for the sounds emanating from the kitchen. She saw Becca at the oven, fixing dinner, and her first instinct was to hurry over and greet her sister, the way she always did.

But that was before she'd carried a gun.

Instead, the same speed was applied to a different route as Jaime hurried into her room. She closed and locked the door behind her, then threw her Berkut bag onto the bed. After a second's deliberation, she grabbed a nearby chair, sat down on it and proceeded to phase two, a minute's deliberation. Her eyes were locked onto the bag so hard that she found herself almost tearing up from the strain, finally averting her gaze in favor of a less offensive subject. The gun wasn't leaving, no matter how much she looked at it or tried to ignore it. The arguments against it came easier that evening than the day before, a sharper mind not lulled into compliance by the promise of sleep.

There had never been guns in the Sommers household; her father preferred shots of the celluloid variety, and a hardcore pacifist like her mother would have never raised a stone, much less a semi-automatic. Lectures about guns, though, had abounded: talk of moral vacuum, and the churning guts of an industrial beast nourished by mankind's self-loathing, and other such high- and-holy concepts that seemed a bit more distant after knowing the feeling of being in the crosshairs. In a way, Jaime admired her mother for that: she'd never given up her faith in nonviolence, no matter how many rifles or sticks or tear gas grenades were against her.

But then, nobody had ever specifically tried to murder Madeline Jo Sommers. This was different. Jaime kept repeating the phrase in her head, trying to banish its hollow ring. _This is different. Normal rules do not apply. I believe in the rules, but they do not apply here. This is different._

Something her father had said about Vietnam went through Jaime's head like a sniper's bullet. _It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it. _It was gone before she realized that it didn't really have anything to do with her situation. The train of thought in her head was a runaway one, steaming past association over association down a track of violent imagery she didn't know was buried there.

_Stop,_ she finally added to the choir in her head. _Stop_, shouted with more force into her consciousness, the strained voice of a teacher at the edge of a professional breakdown. The rallying cry of the portion of herself that demanded a time-out.

She got up in a jump, trying to build momentum to power through her thoughts, and grabbed the bag from the bed. She ripped the zipper of the main compartment open with a bit more force than she intended, but all that mattered was getting at the gun. Finally, she grabbed it, pulled it out, and had it up and aimed at the door before she knew what was happening. She took a few steps back, probing the situation while the weapon stayed welded to her hands. A bright red dot on the door.

_Pull the trigger and you destroy this._

With a flick of her thumb, she worked the magazine release and let the magazine drop free; too caught up in the moment, she missed moving her left hand to catch it, and it clattered to the floor. She bowed down to fetch it; her right arm followed automatically, keeping the pistol aimed at the door. Much more careful now, she laid the magazine onto the desk and then pulled the pistol's slide backward, extracting the last bullet from the chamber. She put it next to the magazine.

_Slide release, slide goes forward, hammer cocked, hit decocker, hammer down._

_Safe. It's safe._

She put the pistol onto the desk, unlocked the door and left the room.

---

She came back into the living room just as Becca turned around from the oven; after an awkward moment, Jaime closed the door behind her and only then walked over to Becca for a hug.

"Hey," she said after they had separated. "How was your day?"

"Forgettable," Becca answered, implying further elaboration to be improper. "I'm making cornbread and chili."

"Great timing," Jaime said, "how did you know I was coming?"

"I didn't," Becca replied, averting her eyes and drawing the sound out; if it was to convey a basic sense of embarrassment, it went on longer than necessary.

The sound of a flushing toilet had Jaime's eyes dart to the bathroom door.

"Your boss is here," Becca said.

Jaime's heart rate accelerated. Jonas Bledsoe was a hard person to read at the best of times, but what did her enigmatic benefactor want from her here? And how, exactly, had he managed to get here faster than she had?

Tom Zucker walked out of the bathroom. Jaime felt the strong urge to not be present.

"Hey, Jaime," he said, extending his hand to shake. She took it, more surprised than reluctant. "You gave us quite the scare yesterday."

"He told me about the mugging," Becca said. "I'm –" she said, then trailed off.

"We were all worried," Zucker said. "You hurried out so quickly yesterday and we found the bathroom mirror all smashed up…"

"I don't know exactly what happened," Jaime said, a strange calm infiltrating her thoughts. "This woman, she sneaks up on me and I think she's coming on to me, so I try to excuse myself – but she was after my wallet."

"That blonde piece of work?" Zucker asked, interpreting Jaime's glance as confirmation. "So what happened?"

"Well, what do you think happened, Mr. Zucker?" Jaime said. _Have to explain the lack of blood_, she thought. _Blunt weapon_, a voice suggested. "She had a weapon, you know, one of those batons, the ones you just swing and they extend, like –" she mimicked the motion – "and I just barely get out of the way, but I don't see her left hand and it hits me right on the chin, I think, because it hurt like hell when I came to."

"That's…and you ran after her?"

"Sure," Jaime said, "what would you do?"

"You could have told me to call the cops," Zucker said, "and we would have gotten you an ambulance."

"I don't think I was all there when I came to," Jaime admitted. "I know, stupid, right? Not like I even had anything big with me. Guess I gave up and then I found my way here. I don't remember it too well, it's kind of a blur."

"I'm more concerned that it's a repeat," he said, "that can't have been good for your concussion."

"It wasn't a concussion," she replied, "and this isn't either. I'm fine. I'm scrappier than that."

"You really should have told your sister, though," he said, and Jaime looked at Becca.

Her expression was difficult to read; Jaime considered her next words, but finally all that came out was "I'm sorry I didn't tell you, we can talk about this later. Can you watch the food while I finish up with Mr. Zucker?"

"Sure," Becca replied and turned away, several of her issues reinforced in one neat go.

"My point is," Zucker insisted, "that I can understand you're shaken up, and I didn't want you to get the impression that I don't care about that. You keep to yourself and I'm fine with that, but you know I'm here if you want to talk about it. And about the quitting…"

"That's final," Jaime said, her eyes still tracking Becca before she looked back at him.

"Well then," Zucker said with a sigh, "I have your money, it's in the envelope on the table. You really were only there for an hour, so…"

"What are you giving me?" Jaime asked, her voice level. "That hour?"

"No, no," Zucker said, "it's all there."

"Thank you – Tom," Jaime said, the same neutrality in her pitch. "Sorry for making this so complicated for you."

"I'll be at the office, if you want to come in. Talk, or, you know…"

"I don't want my job back."

"…we're hiring. It'd be a new job for a qualified bartender, not your old job back."

"The answer's still no."

"Just wanted to make sure you're okay, Jaime."

"I am."

"Guess I'd better get going, it's pretty wild tonight."

"Tom?"

"Yeah?"

"No."

Tom Zucker nodded, grabbed his jacket and walked out of Jaime's life. She felt something without knowing what to call it.

"Jaime," Becca said from behind, "can we talk?"

Jaime closed her eyes, counted to 3, then turned around and sat down with her little sister at the kitchen table. The smell of fresh cornbread sweetened the air, but didn't make the lies come any easier. The faint presence of Jonas Bledsoe's voice in her head did, however.

_Good evening, Miss Sommers,_ he said. _We're monitoring the situation. Would you like some moral support?_

"Yes, let's do it," Jaime said.

_Just keep it simple._

"I'm listening," Becca said, too wrapped up to be self-conscious about the expression.

"I won't be working at the bar anymore," Jaime said. _Good. Start off with something small and true. Take it from there._ "That's because I have a new job." _Good…_

"A new job? When were you going to tell me?"

"Actually, today, because I just got back from signing the contract." _Alright, that's enough details. Put some spin on it._

That hung in the air exactly how a cannonball doesn't, so Becca took the opportunity to dig in.

"So, what is it? Who do you work for?"

"A guy named Jonas Bledsoe." _Now, go with the contract._ "I'm his new…personal assistant."

"…how did that happen?"

"Okay, this is going to be a bit complicated," Jaime said. _No, don't do this. Too elaborate. Don't oversell your hand._ "Well, not really," she corrected herself. "I saved him from his ex-wife. Stepped in when she was making a scene at the restaurant, got a handbag to the face for my trouble. That's why they took me to the hospital on Sunday. He was there when I woke up, together with Will. He offered me the job right there on the spot." _Very nice, you're a natural._

"No way!" Becca said, a smile spreading over her face. "No freakin' way!"

"I know, right?" Jaime said, matching her sister's smile. _Good play, wrap it up._ "Anyway, this guy is loaded. He gave me this prepaid credit card, said I should get myself something nice to wear, no strings. 15,000 dollars, Becca. There were 15 grand on that card."

"What," Becca exclaimed, her face now twisted into a full grin.

"So I'm starting tomorrow," Jaime said. "And next weekend, we're just gonna tear up the town together, you and me. What do you say?" _I don't recall giving you the weekend off, Miss Sommers._ "Well, if he lets me go," she added.

"He's got to!" Becca exclaimed.

"I'm sure I can sneak away for a few hours," Jaime said. "He's already got me on speeddial, anyway."

"But…Jaime, that's great!" Becca said, jumped up from her chair and rounded the table; Jaime got up just in time to be hugged, with more intensity than the last time. Becca separated only after a few seconds, and her eyes met Jaime's.

"So, how much do you earn?"

"A lot," Jaime answered.

"New clothes?"

"That's what the card is for, isn't it?"

"A new place?"

"Yeah, the commute's kind of harsh right now, we'll consider it."

"…a second car?"

"Don't push your luck," Jaime said. Becca gave her a mock scowl, but behind it lurked the certainty that things were going to turn around for the Sommers sisters.

"Now," Jaime said, "let's eat before the bread gets cold."


	6. Chapter 6

Sorry for the longer-than-usual wait, dear readers. And yay, things are happening!

---

The nature of being a small, agile organization was a lack of extraneous personnel; a larger agency could be employing thousands of people, but Berkut had to deal with just its core team of specialists and its far larger contingent of operators. Most of the time, this suited Jonas Bledsoe fine: less people to watch, less people to keep in the loop. However, all of that had been designed from the assumption that Berkut would be called upon to assist other agencies as required; it didn't account nearly as well for cases where they had to do the legwork.

Right there, Bledsoe really, really wanted a team of imagery analysts.

"This is it? You're kidding, right?" was Nathan's reaction. He was staring at a cell phone snapshot of the black & white security footage, which sat somewhere between a recognizable image and a Cubist painting of blotchy tapioca pudding poured onto the sidewalk.

"Can we do anything with it?" Bledsoe asked; Nathan's eyes detached from the crude assembly of pixels and focused on his boss.

_We could delete it!_ was his first thought. _We could send Ruth Truewell to a weekend seminar for photography!_ was another. _Or we could search flickr for images tagged "tanker truck Paradise"!_

"I could look for logos," Nathan offered, wisely deciding not to jeopardize his paychecks, "but that's about it. Even if there was one, I probably couldn't tell, Mr. Bledsoe. I doubt I could even if we had the original tape here."

"Can we arrange transport?" Truewell asked, her voice echoing from the speakers of the operations center. Her voice was made even tinnier by going through the radio equipment to the repeater in the car, but it had been difficult enough to unseal her Berkut issue phone and take a picture with it all suited up; the last thing she wanted to do was keep it in her hands for the rest of the conversation. "For the tape, I mean."

"We'd have to decon it first," Nathan replied. "Faster if you take the tape and the VCR, decon those, and then hook them up to whatever C3 system they're using for the basecamp."

"Sir?" Truewell asked.

Bledsoe nodded. "Do it. Mr. Ambrose, we'll need a data link to the base camp, then."

"That's the easy part," Nathan confirmed.

"Okay. Truewell, I want you and Dr. Anthros to keep looking in Paradise. If you can, get a positive ID on the agent before you carry the contaminated materials into the camp. Ambrose, I need someone at the NGA and the Idaho DoT."

"Uh-huh," Nathan said. The number of the former, he had memorized for requesting satellite or drone footage; the number of the latter, he wasn't sure whether it even was in the computer's interagency phone directory.

---

Will had kept busy during the call examining some of the bodies in the shop. They all showed the same symptoms: loss of bodily fluids, muscles locking up and blueish lips – asphyxiation the likeliest cause. The positions of the corpses suggested a rapid effect, death within minutes – consistent with a large concentration of potent nerve agent. Will rather doubted that he could have done anything to save those people, even if he had been there with a crate full of autoinjectors at the time of the release.

Then again, if he had been there, he'd have died, too. Chemical weapons don't care who you are.

"Let's go," Truewell said. Will held up a finger in admonition and crouched over a body – then grabbed the dead women's clothes and started trying to strip her. "...I don't think you should be doing that," Truewell added.

"She's hardly going to complain, is she?" Will shot back. "Bledsoe's right. We've figured out the mechanism of action, but that still leaves a variety of actual agents with different safety precautions, not to mention we still need to figure out how it got into these people. I just have to be sure, both agent and vector."

"At the risk of stating the obvious, Dr. Anthros, we're wearing respirators. You said an aerial vector…"

"…is most likely, yes," Will mumbled. "I know exactly what I said, but I was still working with the lab results from a man who not only survived and had already received treatment, but may also have nanoactive blood. These people, on the other hand…"

The woman's blouse ripped to the tune of splitting fabric, and Truewell watched the macabre play. Unlike an unconscious body – essentially, a slack and loose ragdoll – the woman's body was rigid like a mannequin, betraying little flex to her limbs or pose. Will discarded the ripped-up blouse and set to work on her left arm, but found that it wouldn't budge.

"I'm not the biggest fan of CSI," Truewell said, "but should the rigor mortis be that advanced? It seems pretty fast to me."

"CSI," Will said, "the original or Miami?"

"Original. Sunglasses don't do it for me."

"It's summer, it was hot out there and it's still warm in here, that can accelerate the process," Will said, "at least that's what I remember from my forensic pathology class. But organophosphates lock the muscles, too, so a full-body rigor doesn't really tell us anything about their time of death." He tried the arm again, slipped off it and raised his hand to wipe his brow before remembering the NBC suit. "Isn't there something you can do?" he asked.

"Well, is there?" she replied. "I have the video, Mr. Bledsoe knows what's up, why are you still molesting that poor woman?"

"Injection marks," Will said, and with a renewed heave he moved the arm, to the sound of a crunch that was far more effective at summoning the bile from Truewell's stomach than any of the previous irritants. She kept it down, barely, but it left her leaning against the next wall making soft gagging noises while Will droned on. What a great time for a lecture.

"VX could also be administered by injection," he said, "though I have a hard time seeing how they could do a whole town like this. Maybe a –" he paused briefly while he forced the newly dislocated shoulder upward – "maybe they're using nanobots as a time delay mechanism! I mean, I know I've floated this before, but it would explain the presence of what I thought were anthrocyte remnants, and it means they needed far less agent than saturating the air all over town. This way, they'd only have to set up some sort of trigger to drop everyone at the same time. I'd have to do some simulations on the lab on the chemical reactivity, though. I don't think you want those breaking down in the bloodstream unpredictably, which limits the initial exposure window to days, if not hours…"

"This is sick…" Truewell said, speaking those three words with the same effort it would require to pull yourself back onto the ice after an involuntary trip through the thin cover of a winter lake.

"No doubt," Will said, checking the woman's armpit and the hollow of her elbows before moving on to the other arm and applying another, though less protracted pulling motion to it. That crunch was faster, if not necessarily less nausea-inducing. "Time-release organophosphate capsules…that would take a truly demented mind to create and use, nevermind the technological sophistication. I think we can shelve that one for now. As for other methods, skin contact would work, nerve agents were designed as contact poisons, after all. Oh, in that case –"

Truewell looked at him, her chest heaving from heavy breaths. "Yes?"

"We need samples of water in the sinks, soaps, lotions, anything that people could be putting on their skin. When I'm done with searching her skin for needle marks, I'll need to check some of the usual suspects for traces."

"The usual suspects?" Truewell asked, not so keen on what she somehow knew the answer would be.

"Mucous membranes. I can hardly check her digestive tract or her lungs without a proper autopsy, but I can take smears from inside her nose, her mouth, her –" Will suddenly paused, looked over to Truewell and rethought his approach. "You know," he continued. "Other places."

Behind her full-face mask, Truewell blinked.

"…soaps and lotions, you said?"

---

Ruth Truewell knew that something inside her head was going the wrong way when they passed a corpse on the street and she had the strongest feeling of already having seen it before. Her air tank had dipped below the one hour mark a few steps ago, and the emotional effects of that change in the scenario would have been fascinating to watch and evaluate if they hadn't been happening to her. How simply flipping one digit in a display to a zero could produce stress reactions…Truewell kept it together. Mostly because she knew she had to.

They had gone back to drop the samples into the car's trunk, but Will had decided to take his portable lab case with him after that. The lab was arguably necessary for their job, but also a burden on his steadily decreasing strength. It wasn't that Will was spectacularly out of shape (though he could have stood to skip a few less gym visits), but the heat and moisture inside the protective suit rapidly climbed to a fairly accurate simulacra of tropical climate. Add his pre-existing fatigue, and Truewell held an honest intellectual curiosity as to how he still managed to be on his feet.

It wasn't a stretch to imagine the two of them aware of both their own and each other's exhaustion, physical and psychologically, so they shared the same sincere relief when they reached the mayor's house. It was an immaculate two-storey building with a trim front lawn, a white picket fence and a US flag waving from an angled pole mounted beneath a window on the second floor. Will had to force the image of a hot, crusty apple pie from his mind.

"Eagle 2, this is Eagle 3," said the radio with a reasonable reconstruction of Agent Brown's voice, "have you found anything yet? Over."

"Lots of bodies, Eagle 3," Truewell said. "But nothing solid yet, over."

"Understood. Eagle 2, do you have a phone with you? Over."

Truewell and Will exchanged a glance at that. If Will had been on the radio, he would have dismissed this as a very, very weird question.

"Eagle 3," Truewell said, "you can reach us under seven zero seven five five five six niner five zero, over."

"Got it. Eagle 3 over and out."

Truewell noted that Will's glance hadn't left her.

"What was that about?" he asked.

"Either he's fishing for a date in the wrong place," Truewell replied, "or he doesn't want to be heard on the radio." She switched her radio's channel and motioned for Will to do the same. "Mr. Ambrose, are you listening?"

"Sure," Nathan replied. "There just isn't anything else for me to do here, right now."

"I suspect that I will be getting a phone call on this line in a few moments," Truewell explained. "I need radio silence on your end and a copy of the recording run through the standard voice tests."

Nathan's reply (a long breath for the big finale windup to a "Get in line, honey" finisher that, in retrospect, didn't seem all that brilliant) was interrupted after the voiced velar plosive consonant by the click sound of someone's call being taken by the car's repeater and jacked into the radio channel. Properly hushed by operational demands, he turned 80% of his attention back to the image of the tanker.

"Hello?" Truewell began. As opening gambits in phone conversations went, it was a well-worn one.

"Yeah, this is Brown," Agent Brown said, subvocally unsatisfied with this mode of communication. "Do you have your radio turned off? I don't need Fleming hearing this."

"Sure," Truewell lied. Well, Fleming wasn't listening. That part was true.

"Good, because I have a message for you." His voice cooled and flattened. "We want Jaime Sommers."

It was a good thing Nathan had muted his headset. Otherwise, his loud scream of "What?" might have ruined the mood.

"This is a demonstration," Brown continued, "of our abilities. By midnight, we will contact Sommers. If she does not follow our instructions to the letter, we will attack a major metropolitan area of our choice. Our most conservative simulation places the number of casualties north of 100,000 people."

"That is…!" Will managed to babble.

"Who exactly are we speaking to?" Bledsoe's voice cut in. The illusion of a private chat on the phone, if it had ever existed, faded rapidly.

"It is not in our interest to give you that information, Mr. Bledsoe."

Nathan's outcries exceeded any measure of decency in both volume and vocabulary.

"I don't particularly care what your interests are," Bledsoe replied, his voice still cool. "If you want to survive this night, now's the time to give up."

"Mr. Bledsoe, please don't debase yourself with idle threats. We wouldn't be talking if there was any chance of you stopping us. Now, remember: Jaime Sommers by midnight, or you'll have to explain to your superiors how you lost a major city. I trust we understand each other."

There was a click on the channel, followed by a brief silence. Nathan was still cursing under his breath, not ready to switch his headset back on. Truewell's thoughts raced. Will felt his head swell up with population figures and LD50s.

Jonas Bledsoe took a deep breath and pinched the bridge of his nose.

"You all heard it," he said, "and it doesn't change our game plan. So, I'll leave you to your work. I need to make a few phone calls."

---

In the Sommers household, talking with your mouth full wasn't just a flagrant breach of etiquette; it was also a communication killer. Becca, to her credit, was a virtual expert in reading lips, even those of strangers, and was familiar enough with Jaime that her lack of hearing almost never mattered in a conversation. However, all of that went out of the window at the dinner table, where overlaying mumbling with chewing motions turned an art into a lottery. Consequently, Jaime listened and participated with rather more readable gestures of her whole head.

"So, this personal assistant job," Becca said. "That's what's kept you busy?"

Jaime nodded.

"I mean, it's awesome. I was…honestly, Jaime, this is like the best thing that's ever happened to you, right?"

That nod was slower in coming. Becca, in turn, seemed unsure of what else to say. The thoughts were there – worrying about her big sister, the changes that would have to happen, how she had good news, too, but…the words were lacking. Becca's hand shot up to rearrange a stray strand of hair, tucking it back behind her ear. Her eyes met with Jaime's, but she quickly looked away again.

Jaime couldn't sate her hunger. She didn't know if the implants or the stress were doing it, but whatever it was, it made her eat two bowls of chili and most of the cornbread. The complementary glass of milk went down quickly, too. The sensation of a bloated stomach coupled with still being hungry wasn't comforting; her body needed more energy than it could digest.

Everything was connected, sized to work in a complex web of performance limits. Change a system, and you quickly discover how every change requires dozens of other adjustments, only some of which had been applied to her. Jaime had enough strength to break her own bones, enough energy to become ravenous, enough lightning-fast combat reflexes to feel out of control. Her right hand felt like it should jitter, but the empty glass it held did not sway. With her left hand, Jaime unscrewed the cap from the jug of milk on the table and poured herself another glass, then drank it just as quickly.

"Hey, can you leave some?" Becca asked; Jaime's eyes shot towards her, and she lowered the glass. "You know, for breakfast."

"Uh, sure," Jaime replied. "I'll grab some on the way back tomorrow."

"Cool. There's, ah, there's a couple other things we're running low on, just fyi. I can make a list."

"A list? Look, if it's gonna be groceries, that can wait until Friday."

"Oh, come on," Becca said with a hint of annoyance. "We never buy enough to last the week."

"Hey, it's hard to plan exactly what we need."

"Right. When you took scissors to the newspaper, why didn't you clip out the coupons completely?" Jaime bit her lip, but Becca didn't let her off the hook. "Yeah, I saw that. I guess you thought I wouldn't try reading it."

_That went bad way too fast,_ Jaime thought.

"All I'm saying," Becca explained, "is that we're past that now, okay? You can live a little, stop locking down the food budget, just go out there and do something crazy."

"No," Jaime replied. "We're still on shaky ground. Until my savings hit five figures, we're not taken care of."

"Squirreling and skimping all the way to the top." Becca leaned in and gave her a gentle smile. "Are you ever going to relax, big sister?"

Jaime reciprocated the gesture. "We might not be having much fun right now, but you -" Jaime said it slowly, but also signed it for effect – "are going to college, and you will kick ass and get a degree."

"Or I get a hotshot doctor to fall in love with me, marry me and be my sugar daddy."

"Becca!"

"What? It's been two years, isn't it time you made an honest woman out of him?"

"We're…" Jaime stammered, completely out of right things to say. "It's complicated."

Becca didn't phrase her reply in the form of words. Instead, she rocked back in her chair, rolling her eyes in the same motion.

"Why does everything in your life have to be so difficult, Jaime?" Becca asked.

"Somebody up there has it in for me, I guess," Jaime replied.

_I need to speak with you,_ Bledsoe whispered into her skull. Jaime closed her eyes. Yes, that would be asking for it.

"Becca, I have to pack some stuff for tomorrow." Jaime let her hand sweep over the plates and glasses on the table. "Would you mind?"

"But FarSight's on in five minutes. Hey, can we budget for a TiVo now?" Becca gave her best impression of an innocent pout. "I could take care of more chores after dinner if I didn't have to worry about missing my shows, you know?"

"Just…put them in the sink," Jaime replied, desperate to exit the dialogue. "I'll wash 'em later, okay?"

This was unusual, but to Becca's clear advantage, so she did not raise an issue with it. Jaime, meanwhile, rushed away from the table.

---

Back in her room, Jaime slammed the door shut behind her and leaned against it. For a second, she tried to be mad at herself, but it wouldn't happen. For all the strength with which Jaime wished it wasn't so, the big lie really hadn't changed anything in the way she interacted with her little sister. It was just another piece on a pile of things she wouldn't share with Becca.

"Oh, hey, by the way," Jaime whispered to herself. "I'm actually a cyborg now. I fight world terrorism. The personal assistant thing, that was stretching it a **little** bit."

_I'm sorry, Miss Sommers,_ Bledsoe's voice came in a mocking tone, _is this a bad time for you?_

Jaime's voice echoed the exhaustion her body didn't feel. "What do you want now?"

_A situation has developed. We need you mobile for the next few hours._

"…mobile?"

_We're currently dealing with a threat against you. Frankly, they know more about us than I am comfortable with, so we can't be sure that your location or any of our safe houses isn't already on their target list._

Jaime felt herself stiffen up. Her hands grabbed the P226 from the desk and loaded the magazine; the stray bullet stayed on the desk. Her eyes followed the Berkut bag onto the bed.

"Is Becca safe?" she asked, tucking the weapon back into the security compartment of the bag and slinging it over her shoulder. Her mind wasn't racing. There was no anxiety, no uncertainty about her next steps. Gather equipment. Maintain communications. Evade surveillance.

_We've considered a possible hostage scenario,_ Bledsoe said in a warm, paternal tone of voice. Well, as warm and paternal as Jaime had ever heard him, anyway. _Your sister isn't a likely target. We will keep our guards on station, of course, but the threat is against you specifically. If we can keep you out of their reach, it might frustrate them into exposing themselves with an overt action._

"Anywhere in particular you want me to go?" Jaime asked. It sounded like she was inquiring as to which flaming hoop she should tackle first.

_I like federal buildings, myself,_ Bledsoe said. _Tell them the DoD will authenticate you. If anybody tries to stop you on the street, you do what it takes to get away. Can you handle that?_

Jaime heard herself say "Got it."

---

Ruth Truewell and Will Anthros walked into Mayor Peters's house with a newfound sense of urgency. They had no time to search everything, but Truewell bagged a few bottles and food items for later testing while Will tossed the Mayor's desk for documents. Truth be told, it took him four minutes to determine that none of the copious pieces of paper on, in or nearby the desk held anything obviously related to the attacks. If anything was in there to be found, it would be discovered by careful forensic analysis and cross-referencing over a period of days, if not weeks. Will braced his hands on the desk, coiled his arms and then sent a quick slap onto the faux-oak desktop. He closed his eyes and sighed. God freaking damn it, how could anyone have blindsided them – and, by extension, the entire US government – that badly?

"I think I've got something," Truewell said, inexplicably standing next to him. He looked at her as if she'd said something right. "I followed a whirring sound outside," she explained as they walked to the already opened back door of the house. "I don't think it's a regular air conditioning unit."

Will's eyes swept the grass (slightly overdue for mowing), a small bike with a green frame and training wheels, and a dog house. A trail of vomit and feces stretched from slightly in front of its entrance all the way inside. Will tried to imagine what a dying dog would sound like. He couldn't come up with a good answer for that. Truewell pointed him to the fan assembly mounted to the wall. He had to admit that he didn't have a solid grasp on how external air conditioning units were supposed to look, and said as much.

"The thing is," Truewell explained, "there are no vents in the house. None. I saw a regular external AC unit mounted in one of the windows, but this one seems to be cooling a storage room of some sort."

"Storage, huh?" Will said. "Did you check?"

"The room doesn't have any windows, and the door…it looked like it sealed. We passed it on the way here, did you see it?"

"No, I – I wasn't paying attention." He turned to Truewell. "I think the nootropics are wearing off."

"Nootropics? Like, modafinil?"

Will laughed nervously.

"I'm sort of running a drug trial," he said.

"Experimenting with untested drugs is a dangerous pastime, Dr. Anthros. Not to mention that it affects your mission capability. And you lied to me, you told me you're on stimulants."

"It is a stimulant cocktail," Will insisted, as if the 'irritated' switch in his head had been flipped. "Just not an amphetamine, I don't do so well on speed."

"I can't really judge that without knowing **what** you're on, can I?" Truewell shot back. "We need to get out of here. You're not reliable and the tape needs to be analyzed as soon as possible."

"Sure, after we check the room."

"…after we check the room," Truewell agreed, though not without gnashing her teeth. "Of all the times to pull a stunt like this…" she added.

"Put it in your report," Will said, "and I'll feel suitably chastised."

The door **was** sealed, Will concluded after a brief inspection. There was a tough rubber lining surrounding it, sealing against the frame from the sides, the top and the bottom, and the door's handle wasn't articulated – instead, a keypad was affixed to the wall next to the door.

"Can we break it down?" Truewell asked.

"I don't think so," Will said. "It looks like a safe room. The door's probably thicker than some of the walls in here. Separate air supply…oh, fuck me."

"What?"

"It's got a filter. This damn thing has an air filter mechanism inside. He was expecting the attack."

"An attack," Truewell cautioned. "And why didn't he go inside?"

The question handily drew an answer in the form of a knocking sound. It took Truewell a moment to realize that it came from inside the safe room; a glance at Will confirmed that he was too lost in his own thoughts to contribute any situational awareness to the issue. With a tacit move, Truewell knocked on the door.

There was a crackling sound from what Truewell realized was a speaker grille above the keypad in the wall, and then the voice of a little girl filled the hallway.

"Daddy?" she cried. "Can I come out now, Daddy?"


	7. Chapter 7

Hello, everyone. As you can see, things are happening. Aren't you all glad? Now, I know this is jinxing myself in the worst possible way, but I have a feeling that the rest of Paradise regained will have a somewhat faster writing tempo than the first half. I do much better when I'm writing action scenes. Also, is it too early to start openly begging for some reviews? I could just use some validation, is all.

(And I need to know your names to steal your souls, so there's that.)

---

The look exchanged between Ruth Truewell and William Anthros after hearing the girl's voice from the safe room defied easy description. It wasn't just confusion or concern or reassurance, but a complex mélange of all those and more, an uneasy cocktail mixed from a recipe concocted in earlier high-pressure situations. On Will's face, a major note of intellectual curiosity could be found: the girl's voice was another piece of the puzzle, and his mind was abuzz with all the ways it could fit into the rather sparsely populated jigsaw of clues he had access to. Truewell's expression had a bitter flavor; her primary objective, even beyond doing her job, was to get out of the hot zone, and talking with a frightened little girl was an obstacle.

That didn't mean she wouldn't do it. Beyond all the possible interpretations of the delay between the girl's cry for her dad and Truewell's response, the fact that Truewell replied at all weighed supreme.

"Hello," she said. "Your Dad isn't here right now. My name is Ruth. What is yours?"

Whatever subjective measurement of eternity it had taken for Truewell to make this reply was doubled in the wait for the girl's response. It was enough time for Will to consider that there might be a button they'd have to press to talk back to the girl, consider telling Truewell that, discard the idea upon another look at her face and go back to trying to fight the spread of an almost supernatural tiredness through his legs and arms.

"I'm Madison," the girl replied. Just from her voice, Truewell pegged her at eight years old or thereabouts. "Have you seen my Dad, Missus Ruth?"

"Your Dad is sick," Truewell said. "We took him to a doctor. We would like for you to come with us, Madison."

"He told me not to leave until he comes back, Missus Ruth."

"But he didn't know he would get sick."

"I heard screaming," Madison said, quieter than before. "Are a lot of people sick?"

"…yes," Truewell said. "That's why we want you to go with us."

"Us?" Madison asked, suspicion creeping into her voice.

"Me, and my friend Will here. He's a doctor. He made your daddy better and he'll make sure you don't get sick."

"So you're friends with my daddy?"

"Yes," Truewell lied easily, "and he asked us to go here and get you. He's worried about you."

"Okay. But I need to unlock the door first. It's pretty complicated!"

"No!" Truewell said, almost shouting before she got her voice back under control. "Please don't do that now, Madison. There's something in the air that makes people sick."

"What about Bobby?"

"Who's Bobby, Madison?"

"My puppy," the girl said. "Daddy didn't tell you?"

"He must have forgotten," Truewell replied. "We saw his house outside, but he wasn't there. I'll see if I can find him. My friend Will wants to talk to you, so be nice to him and do what he says, okay?"

"Okay," came Madison's reply, quiet and flat. "Please, you have to find Bobby. He gets…you know, he gets very scared, Missus Ruth."

Will took Truewell aside.

"What exactly are we going to do?" he whispered to her.

"I'll make the call," she replied, "you figure out how to get the girl out of there."

While Will began talking, Truewell moved away from the safe room and back to the house's front entrance. Nightfall outside was complete now, illuminated only by sparse street lamps. She wasn't afraid of the dark, but this would have been an excellent time and place to start.

---

The countdown in Special Agent's Brown head was accelerating. His function here was to observe and influence subtly; ideally, to keep Berkut from discovering too many clues too quickly. Not all contingencies could have been accounted for, especially regarding the mayor's preparations. But as Sun Tzu had written: Know your enemy and yourself, and you need not fear the results of a hundred battles. (Which translation was that, anyway? Brown couldn't remember.)

He had converted one of the containers shipped in by the National Guard into his private base of operations, and subsequently gone out of his way to not give them any reasons to watch him all too closely. His gear, such as it was, accounted for one duffel bag half unpacked and a backpack he hadn't touched yet.

His room had the good fortune to hold two radio sets; one, he had received from the Guardsmen to "stay in touch" with the investigation, and it was essentially useless since the Berkut guys refused to communicate on the frequency they had agreed on with Captain Fleming. The other was a rather more sophisticated set fit for low-grade electronic warfare, a police scanner on steroids. He had jacked into the only cell phone tower in range and expected to have to forward his findings to the home base for decryption, but conveniently enough, his opponents had foregone even that laughable attempt at secure communications. Sniffing out their radio frequency hadn't been hard.

"…and get that girl out," Bledsoe said, his voice unmistakable even through radio. "Maybe there's something in the air filter of the safe room you can analyze."

Brown considered that. From what he understood, this was an unlikely scenario, but it was one worth watching. The distant thunder of helicopter blades slicing through the night sky stirred something in him; he stood up and grabbed the unopened backpack. The rest of the conversation between Bledsoe and Truewell was hopelessly banal, the usual pep talk platitudes and assurances when cogs in a machine started to behave like people. How quaint.

He stepped out of his container and locked it behind him; the padlock he'd brought with him to secure the door was a high-security model with a hardened shroud for the shackle, made of a tough boron-steel compound and equipped with a military-grade secure key cylinder system. He doubted that the unit had anything fancier than a medium-sized bolt-cutter on hand, so they would have to open the container the hard way.

Then again, maybe not. In ten minutes, opening the container would no longer be on anyone's mind.

Brown whistled a cheery tune as he walked through the semi-dark with a flashlight in his hand, though if you had stopped him and asked about it, he couldn't have told you why he had music on his mind: he just did. It was one of those nights.

His steps led him close to the quarantine tent, and the guards tensed when they saw him approach. With his free hand, he flashed his FBI badge – not that anyone here didn't know him already, but still, protocol and all.

"Call came down from headquarters," Brown lied, "I need to speak with the mayor before you evacuate him."

"I don't think he's conscious, Sir," the guard replied.

"Then that's what I need to report, but I gotta cover my ass."

The guard shook his head wistfully. "Sir, if you don't mind me sayin': same shit, different club."

"Ain't that the truth," Brown replied with a smile. "You have a good one, soldier."

"See you in a minute, Sir."

Inside the tent, things were as expected: the mayor unconscious, the medic distractedly catching up on some paperwork. Brown smiled and approached the bed.

"Anything I can do for you, Agent Brown?" the medic asked.

"Just thought I'd check in, but I'm good. Need to take down a visual description before I lose this guy."

"Knock yourself out," the medic replied.

Brown lowered his backpack and opened it. His body rebelled briefly at what was to come, but in the end it only amounted to a shiver. He retrieved a bottle of lighter fluid from below, unscrewed the cap and poured it out over the mayor's body.

"Hey, what…" is as far as the medic's shout got. Then there were two bangs, and Brown turned his pistol to the tent's entrance. Both guards rushed in, rather stupidly. BANG BANG BANG and they dropped, too. Brown couldn't allow himself the time to gloat or pat himself on the back for his marksmanship; the cries outside rose quickly, and he was running out of time to destroy the evidence. He finished pouring out the bottle, opened a second and poured that over the mayor's body, too. The heart monitor next to the bed increased the frequency of its beeps – it was as if Peters knew what was going to happen. Well, Brown had seen stranger things.

He retrieved a lighter from his jacket and clicked it open, his attention split between trying to get a flame going and keeping his gun aimed at the entrance. The people outside were assembling for a dynamic entry, and he still had two things to do.

He held the flame close to the mayor. The body went up like a bonfire and something like a scream escaped the dying man. Brown's left hand bore fresh burns from being so close to the flash of flame, though his sleeve hadn't caught on fire. There was no pain. It was an interesting experience he wouldn't remember, because now he was on the last step of today's agenda.

"This had better work," he said to himself, then opened his mouth and inserted the muzzle of his gun. Despite the procedures, there was a shake to his hand that he couldn't quite get under control. A survival mechanism – how laughable. Brown wouldn't remember that, either.

He pulled the trigger. 645 joules of energy erupted from the barrel in the form of a jacketed hollow point slug, crashed through his palate and nasal cavity before smacking through his skull and scrambling his brain into a nasty mush of dying neurons going out with a final electrochemical storm.

Fleming's soldiers soon entered the tent. They found five bodies: three shot, one suicide, one extra crispy.

---

After pondering whether to tell Becca or not for a moment, Jaime left without informing her little sister. She might have been able to explain this away, sure, but it would have introduced more worries, and Jaime had decided that she didn't need that for Becca right now. _Let her believe that things are going well_, Jaime reasoned. _She probably won't even notice._

Jaime slipped out of her room with her beat-up leather jacket and the Berkut bag slung over her shoulder; Becca was watching TV, as she had said. She would then go to her room to finish her homework, maybe surf the Internet a bit, then go to sleep by eleven.

Normal. Routine. Jaime was starting to appreciate that.

Outside, her eyes fell on her car. It was the same old thing she'd driven for years, a hand-me-down Honda from a coworker who had moved back to Chicago. All things considered, it wasn't fancy, but it wasn't old enough to cost more in maintenance than it was worth, and it got Jaime and her sister from point A to point B. But after today, Jaime felt something sinister about it. This car had been followed. The bad guys knew about it. Did they have the license plate, access to her registration…was there a hidden tracker on it?

The car radiated danger. Jaime stepped away from it and fell into a brisk walk away from the house.

Inside the house, a curtain closed, and Becca turned away from the window. She didn't know how to react to the sight of her sister walking away, but it didn't put her at ease. Truth be told, Becca had been suspicious from the start, ever since Zucker had told her about Jaime's behavior at the bar. And leaving without telling her, that was definitely not like Jaime at all. But the suspicion didn't add up to anything solid, not even a vague shape of something, and without that Becca had no idea how to breech the topic with Jaime. Her big sister was a private person, sure, prone to doing things that Becca wasn't privy to. But Becca wondered…

She walked past the door to Jaime's room, her hand brushed up against it – and withdrew. _No_, she thought, _not like that_. She walked back to the couch, sat on it and tried to watch TV. After a minute, she got the feeling that the episode wasn't very good. She didn't want to see it. She had to…

Becca walked into her room, grabbed the netbook from her desk and walked back into the living room. After a minute, the small device had finished booting up, and her finger danced over the small touchpad to open the web browser. A few seconds to start the program while the netbook hooked into the neighbour's wireless network, and she was online.

Becca googled "Jonas Bledsoe".

---

At the Wolf Creek operations center, Nathan Ambrose's multitasking skills were still in the process of being pushed to the limit by everything he had to do. Calling the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency had led to rather quick results: no satellite overflights or drone images of Paradise from the last 24 hours. Similar things were heard from the Idaho Department of Transportation: Oh, they had plenty of pictures from traffic cameras all over Idaho, but none of the truck weighing stations had images of a tanker truck matching the details of the rig from the image. Nathan felt like he was on the verge of another idea, but it didn't come out.

It was perhaps excusable, then, that he only noticed Jaime's telemetry spiking after a minute of activity. With an easy tap of his index finger, he brought a detailed status report of Jaime's systems onto his screen and jacked into her communication system.

"Yo, Sommers," he said, "what exactly do you think you're doing? The boss tells you to come in and you're going for a jog!"

"Can't use the car," Jaime replied. "I think there's a tracker on it."

"Yeah, no shit," Nathan said. "Of course we're tracking your car. So?"

"No, somebody else…on the way back home, they followed me."

"Hold on, you had a tail and you didn't tell us?"

"…I screwed up."

"Well, Sommers, if you'd told us then, we would have them in custody and maybe we could get some freaking answers out of them. But yeah, that ride's grounded until we can take it apart, good instinct. Now, mind telling me why you're running?"

"Hard to predict, hard to track," she replied. "Impossible to follow me."

"First off, fast as you're going, you're sticking out. I'm reading you just south of some busy streets; people are going to see you run the Olympic 100 meter sprint. Besides, you can't sustain this speed."

---

When Jaime had accelerated herself to running speed, it had been one long moment of cognitive dissonance: there was a certain sprint speed she knew she could get to for a few seconds, but with the augmentations in place, she'd gone way past that with little trouble. It felt like she had the strength and stamina to spare to go even faster, maybe race a car for a short distance, even. Only now was there something like a slight burn in her lungs. It felt great.

_T__hat's why they call it the endorphin rush,_ she heard Nathan explain in her head. _But you don't run on cold fusion. You have a few more minutes before your body puts on the brakes and then you'll be no good to anyone._

A low, rolling thunder echoed through the street, strong enough for Jaime to hear.

"How close am I to the BART?" she asked.

_Mapping it now,_ Nathan replied. _Uh, you're about six hundred meters west of the tracks, Colma station coming up._

"Schedule?"

_The__re's a train already inbound. But it'll be there in two minutes, and you have to cross a highway._

"Guide me."

Jaime picked up more speed.

---

In Paradise, Ruth Truewell waited. The minutes on her air supply timer counted down steadily, as did her nerves. A few minutes ago she'd even imagined something like shots in the distance. She was getting too jumpy for her own good. She switched her flashlight on and waved it through the darkness.

"I am uncomfortable," she told herself, "but this will pass. We will pick up Madison Peters and then we will leave. We will leave and then there will be nothing more to worry about."

Just a few meters from here, William Anthros crouched next to the door on what Truewell estimated to be his fifth wind, at the very least. The stimulants weren't wearing off like somebody had just flipped a switch, but they were getting erratic, and the periods where Will felt dull and tired were getting longer. Soon enough, even staying awake would be a struggle. He'd just have to work fast; then again, his work was almost done.

"It's hard to breathe, Doctor Will," Madison said from the other side of the security door, with the telltale muffled voice of wearing an NBC protection mask. Will had expected more drama, but the room was stocked with gear fitting children – including a full-body chemsuit. Will wondered, once again, just how Mayor Peters knew what to prepare for.

"That's okay," Will said. "It won't be for long. Now, Maddie, I need you to check everything again, okay? You're wearing the suit, the boots, the gloves and the mask, yes?"

"Yes."

"Good! Do you see any rips or tears anywhere?"

"No," Madison confirmed after a brief pause.

"There should be a drawstring in the hood of the overall, Maddie. I want you to pull that closed, as tight as you can, over the edge of the mask. Can you do that?"

"I did it, Doctor Will. Are we done?"

"In a moment, Maddie. Do you know how to tie a knot without looking?"

"…yes."

"Okay, if you have any trouble with this, you can tell me, right? What I want you to do now is take the ends of the drawstrings and tie a knot under the mask's filter. Make it good and tight, it has to hold while you move."

"Okay."

Will considered Madison's situation. He couldn't help but admire how well the girl was keeping it together; but from a certain angle, he didn't think that her getting out of here alive was a good thing. Even if her father survived the night, everyone else she knew from the town was dead, and the terror of this day would weigh on her for a long time. As for the chemical agent, Will still couldn't wrap his head around it. An aerosol still seemed the likeliest, but no standard sensor could pick it up. His readings from Mayor Peters's blood were still the only thing that could confirm its organophosphate nature – there seemed to be no puddles, no resin in any obvious places. And once Will had admitted to himself that it could hardly be VX then, new options had opened up. The phrase Novichok lingered in the back of his mind, a boogeyman of chemical weapons history supposedly not only invisible to US chemical sensors, but specifically made to go through standard protective filters. If that was the poison dripped onto the apple of Paradise, there was a good chance that he would watch Maddie die.

From an even more detached point of view, that would be vital experimental data, useful in finally narrowing down the Paradise agent. Will shivered. Sometimes, his mind went to places that were very dark, indeed.

"All done!" Madison shouted from inside the room, sounding a bit proud of her achievement. Will reconsidered his move. It would be easy to tell her not to leave the shelter, but was it safer? Whatever air filter the room used, it would soon stop working, wouldn't it? Certain death, Will reasoned, and so it would be worth the gamble to take her with them.

"Alright, Maddie," Will said. "You're a clever girl, and we're done with the preparations. You can open the door now."

"Okay!"

As the door groaned from releasing its locking mechanism, Truewell strolled over, waving her turned-off flashlight like a talisman.

"I'll carry her," she offered. "The less she moves, the less she breathes, right?"

"Makes sense," Will replied.

The door opened, and Madison stepped out at a pace one might charitably call reluctant. She took a deep breath, as if the test the filter attached to the mask. Will winced, but said nothing.

"Hello," Truewell said. "I'm Ruth."

"You look weird with that mask," Madison replied. "Do I look like that?"

"It'll be over soon, Maddie." She turned to Will. "Anthros, make sure you grab the filter from inside."

"On it," Will replied, and stepped past Madison into the small safe room. He started moving emergency supplies aside to get to the room's air filter.

"It's dark out there, and you must be tired," Truewell said to Madison. "Come on, I'll carry you." She crouched down, held out her hand to the girl and whispered "When we're outside, you close your eyes, okay, sweetie?"

The flash of light reflected in the lenses of Madison's mask preceded the sound of the explosion by a split second. Truewell whirled around just in time to see a small fireball rising from the direction of the base camp; her hand snapped to the radio and switched to the guard channel. At once, the headset came alive with frantic shouting and barked orders.

Madison had a rather simpler reaction. She just ran away.

"Maddie!" Truewell shouted, frozen for half a second before she ran after her. Her flashlight flicked on, and the beam of light moving with her arm created a bobbing cone of light, sometimes only catching the ground, then rising back to rest squarely on Madison's back again. The little girl was fleet from fear, but Truewell easily closed the distance until she almost had Madison in reach of her free hand…almost…

Truewell had paid too much attention to the girl and not enough to what was in her path. There was a brief sensation of falling as she stumbled over the curb. As if in slow-motion, she saw the swinging air hose dangling from her mask catch on a fencepost and stretch with her tumble. The last thing she clearly remembered was hearing that awful sound of reinforced plastic and rubber tearing, and then she hit the ground, pummeled all over by the heavy gear on her back and lacking the time or the grace to catch her fall.

Almost at once, Truewell's breath – already laborious from chasing Madison – grew frantic. There was nothing she could do that seemed to fight the feeling of her lungs tensing up. It was like trying to breathe concrete, the valve in her mask preventing her from being exposed to fresh air. By reflex or instinct, her hands shot for the mask, grabbed at whatever wasn't slick, tried to move it, to jostle it, anything to keep breathing; and finally, with a herculean effort, she ripped it off. The sound! The sound of adhesive tape ripping free, rubber being bent, cool evening air rushing in on her hot face. Her arms felt numb, and so did her legs. There was no relief from the fresh air, either. Nothing seemed to get past her mouth, a wheezing sound in her throat but no oxygen getting into her lungs, nothing going where it needed to go.

Her eyes were wide open in fear as she saw Will kneel down over her, and her efforts to raise her arm – she wanted to grab him, hold him, shake him until this passed – were futile. Her body was frozen from shock, raw terror coursing through her blood. All her mouth was good for was to gasp with, like a fish being held just inches above the water by a mean child. She spat out something like "Can't breathe!"; or maybe that was just her imagination. She looked at Will fumbling with a plastic cylinder, and realized it was an autoinjector.

_Please,_ she pleaded to whoever would hear her. _God, please. Not like this. Please._

---

Jaime raced through the station's southwestern parking lot, drawing stares from the few people still present at this hour. All things considered, her velocity still felt unreal, even if she had slowed down to a more "plausible" sprint speed. She could hear the train slowing down before the station, and trying not to spook anyone was steadily slipping lower on her list of priorities. Far below actually catching the train, that was for sure. She raced through a pedestrian overpass with Nathan's voice as the angel on her shoulder.

_Rooftop parking lot has stairs going down__ into the station main,_ he said. _From there, you can reach the platform._

"No time for that," Jaime protested. "I'll jump."

Over Nathan's objections – but fortunately out of sight of any obvious civilians –, Jaime barreled straight off the edge of the roof with a jump, a precisely calculated trajectory onto the roofing over the stairs to the platform. For a moment, there was doubt: would the roofing actually hold up to the impact? But it did, and the thumping sound of her landing was mostly swallowed by the wailing brakes of the city-bound train coming to a stop on the platform. With a roll and a reversal worthy of an Olympic-level gymnast, she left the roof, caught the edge with her hands and swung down just in front of the turnstiles.

"Made it," she coughed, finally out of breath. The feeling of triumph dulled measurably when she saw what she was faced with: full height turnstiles, and no ticket to operate them. Her brain briefly filled with various moves to circumvent them, but she could already see a transit cop looking her way, no doubt wondering how she had gotten into that position.

_Swipe your arm__ over the TransLink sensor_, Nathan's voice came, and figuring that she had nothing to lose at this point, Jaime did just that. The turnstile opened for her, and to the tune of the unbearably loud signal that warned passengers to step away from the train, Jaime slipped into the car with just a second to spare.

---

_This,_ Will thought, _this isn't good at all._

People frequently told him that he had a talent for understatement.

"Stay calm!" he admonished Truewell, desperately trying to think of some way to pacify her, but coming up empty. The best thing to do, he figured, was to start treating her before the agent could finish what it had obviously already started. He'd never seen an organophosphate acting that quickly, but even if the effect hadn't fully spread to her limbs yet, it was already shutting down her lungs. Second-guessing would have to wait; he jammed the injector against her thigh and hit the button.

A needle shot through Truewell's chemsuit and skin, depositing doses of atropine and pralidoxime into her body. She flailed against the pain of the injector stuck in her leg, but he held her down as he scrambled for the discarded mask, vainly trying to retrieve it. Maybe he could place a filter on it and put that back on Truewell to at least keep her from sucking even more poison out of the air.

What happened next caught Will completely off-guard; Truewell's arms, instead of relaxing, renewed their flailing, and her breath grew even shallower. Now, Will figured, was the right time to second-guess; he felt her pulse or lack thereof on her neck, but touching her chest revealed a desperately out of control heartbeat.

_Tachycardia,_ he thought, and then it dawned on him. Atropine overdose.

By now, desperation was starting to grab his features – Truewell finally, mercifully, passed out, but that didn't leave Will home free. What had been a racing heartbeat degenerated into weak quivers, and the only gear he had on him were more autoinjectors. _And if you call within the next ten minutes, we will upgrade your standard tachycardia to ventricular fibrillation, absolutely free of charge!_

The precordial thump was a panic move; Will made his right hand into a fist, took aim and struck a blow against Truewell's chest, hoping against all odds that he'd catch a break, but nothing of the sort happened. Her heart quivering ineffectively, preventing oxygenated blood from circulating. He only had a few minutes to come up with something else, but in what might have been the first positive development in the entire chain of events, an idea struck him at once: the safe room. With no other choice but to get to it, he left Truewell on the ground and ran off, sprinted back into the house. Whether it was the adrenaline or the nootropics kicking in for one last hurrah, he wasn't sure, but it carried him back there in what seemed like two seconds. The safe room still loomed large, stocks of emergency supplies crammed into every corner, but a large, brightly-colored piece stood out: an emergency orange bag, bearing the large, white letters "AED". Will grabbed it without further delay and sprinted back to Truewell. The air supply computer on his arm beeped to tell him that he was digging into the safety reserve, the last fifteen minutes of air. He hadn't checked his supply in some time, and he wasn't about to start then, either. With a sliding stop, he threw the package down next to Truewell's prone form.

The chemsuit was hard to grip with his gloves, but he managed, and with the single-minded strength of a man with a mission, he easily tore the suit apart. He spilled the bag onto the ground: an automated external defibrillator revealed itself, packaged with a thin illustrated manual that was about as relevant for Will's next actions as a 1933 edition of Jane's All the World's Aircraft. Simply removing the device from its packaging brought forth a pleasant female voice, speaking in clearly enunciated tones for the benefit of the suspected-to-be-clueless user.

"Attach pads to victim's bare chest," it said. Will briefly – very briefly – wondered if there was anything to that bit of chat he'd heard once about the bra's underwire burning the skin when exposed to the electrical shock of, say, defibrillator paddles. Maybe? Besides, as the nice voice had advised, he was supposed to attach the pads to a **bare** chest.

Why take chances now?

"Sorry for that," Will managed to say.

"Analyzing rhythm," the device said, "do not touch victim."

"It's fibrillating, alright?" Will almost shouted. He felt the seconds tick away. Being at the mercy of whatever medical supply store Peters had bought the AED left Will with a profound sense of helplessness.

"Shock advised," the AED said, then added a belated "Charging."

"Come on, come on…" Will said, checking Truewell's neck for a pulse and her airways for blockage, but neither had manifested. Zero sum game, that.

"Do not touch victim. Press shock button now."

Will pressed the button. The AED discharged. For a fateful moment, Will was frozen.

"Start CPR," the device said nonchalantly. "Begin with compressions."

Will knelt beside Truewell, his hands moving over her naked chest in quite possibly the least sexy circumstances imaginable. They interlocked just between her breasts, and Will bowed forward, straightening his arms. He felt no heartbeat beneath. In this situation, that was good news: at least the shock had bumped her heart out of hummingbird mode. Now, all he had to do was restart it, and with a little bit of luck, normal sinus rhythm would resume.

He started compressing, and kept going. All he had to keep in mind was the rhythm, and he found to his distaste that the Bee Gees method kept him on track fairly well. The whole enterprise had seemed much less exciting on his last date with Rescue Annie.

He was about twenty compressions shy of the AED's next piece of sage advice when Truewell drew a sharp breath, and her eyes flew open. Will's hands quickly faded from her chest; two fingers on her neck confirmed a normal pulse.

"What the," Truewell coughed, "what the hell was that?" She looked at Will, her eyes tearing up from stress. "I thought I would die."

"Yes," Will replied, and after a few more of her breaths, concluded that there were, indeed, no signs whatsoever of her suffering from nerve agent poisoning. "Well, the good news is, you're not dead or dying. The bad news is," he said, "I officially have no idea what the fuck is going on here."


	8. Chapter 8

Hey, everyone! So much for increasing the tempo, I guess. On the plus side, the parts where I wasn't tearing my hair out in frustration over not being able to put down a word for this (read: 90% of last month) were really fun. We'll return to Antonio Pope next chapter, I couldn't fit him into this one.

Oh, also, I'll be adding commentary at the end of chapters from here on. This will be technical / tactical explanations (because this helps cut down on the "Explain (thing) to Jaime" stuff and also reduces the googleing you guys need to do), character profiles (because, as you may have guessed, I'm going to shuffle around character traits and histories from the official versions to better fit what I'm trying to do) or a deeper look at some of the themes the stories deal with. If you're down with that, you'll get your first (and already overlong) dose here; if you don't care, you can safely skip it.

So, on with it!

---

Jaime found a seat just as the train rolled out of the station, the acceleration of its sudden start pushing her against the backrest. The car was almost empty, spare a few grungy tweens in the back.

"That was way too close," she whispered.

_I __must have asked for it,_ Nathan replied. _Yeah, I absolutely did. Oh, train in two minutes, you'll never make it – just fyi, that was not an invitation to try, okay? I keep forgetting your complete lack of subtlety, but silly me, I'm sure I'll remember it after a few more stunts like this._

"No need to freak out," Jaime said tersely.

_Is there anyone in the car__ with you? Are you talking to yourself in public?_

In response, Jaime pulled the cellphone out of her jacket and slid it open. As far as she could tell, the youngsters (what a terrible word – she wasn't that much older, was she?) hadn't paid any attention to her at all.

"There, now I'm speaking on the phone," Jaime said. "Excuse me for being new to this."

_Your inexperience I can handle, it's the intense helping of stupid I'm struggling with,_ Nathan said, sounding more frustrated than genuinely angry. _Sommers, does the phrase "cellphone camera" mean anything to you? Are you, by any chance, familiar with a thing called YouTube? Maybe you have even heard about this hot new trend,_ _blogging?_

"I'm," Jaime began, then pinched the bridge of her nose. Her head was flooding with a dull, throbbing pain. "I'm really not in the mood for this. I just left my sister…"

Becca.

"…I just left Becca at home, all alone, and she doesn't even know that I'm out, or where I am." Jaime almost got up then and there. The voice in her head offered a solid appraisal of how to jump through the next large window and optimize her body position for a full-speed landing, but instead of going with the machine's flow, Jaime fought the urge and pointedly remained seated. "I lied to her," she said, more to herself than Nathan.

_Yeah, that was impressive,_ Nathan said. _We all had a nice front-row seat to that very emotional moment. Your sister's something else, Sommers; you really just wanna hug her and tell her everything's going to be alright with her and the world. So you did it! I have to admit, for a moment there, I thought the story wouldn't work, but you really sold it._

"That was pretty much the opposite of what I wanted to hear."

_Oh. Oh! My bad, __got my wires crossed, you wanted the "Sometimes you need to do bad things to protect the people you love" speech. Let's see…_

"Ambrose…"

_Oh, yeah, I got it, here goes:__ Sommers, sometimes you need to do bad things to protect the people you love. You know, for truth, justice and the American Way! Uh, well…I guess not so much truth, what with the lying, but my point is: Leave the scathing criticism of your every action to me, I'm better at it. _

"Uh huh. Can you start supporting me now?"

_I'm already updating your navigation with the federal buildings in town__. And that's about it, right? I mean, do you need anything else? I could call a babysitter for Becca…_

"No."

…_or find you a theme song…_

"No!"

_Ah, okay, __you want some me time, cool with me, I'll just shut up. You go enjoy that train ride. But don't forget to swipe your arm when you get out._

"Sure, Ambrose, whatever," Jaime said, rubbing her temples. "So, how did you get me through the turnstile?"

_Ma__aaaa-gic!_ Nathan said. _You owe me 10 bucks, by the way._

---

Will's next task (in the Herculean sense) was to shine his flashlight at Truewell without looking at her. It was just as well that he was still masked and in the dark, because his face was red with embarrassment – not over the naked skin Truewell was still working to cover up, but over his lapse in judgment. He was sitting a few feet away from her, resting the heavy bottles on his back against a fence. While his eyes burned holes into the night, he listened to duct tape being torn, ripped and smoothed out.

"Anthros?" Truewell asked, and he took that as an invitation to interrupt his penance stare. He chanced a look at her and found that she had repaired her suit with the liberal application of adhesive tape, but where the half-spent roll weighed lightly in her left hand, her protective mask was all the heavier in her right. "So," she said, "do I screw in a filter and put it back on?"

"I don't know," Will conceded, "but I don't think it would hurt. We need to get out of here anyway, maybe the agent has some sort of delayed onset, or it could be waiting for the next trigger, or –"

"I think we've established that you don't know."

"Sorry," Will said, shaking his head. "I'm just…this has been one bad call after another."

"The important thing is still that we get out," Truewell replied. "We need to find out what happened at the camp, find Madison, retrieve the filter from the safe room and report in."

"The camp," Will repeated absent-mindedly, "what about the camp?"

"Focus," Truewell said with a harsh twang. "The explosion that scared Madison came from the direction of the camp. There's no chatter on the radio, so something has gone very wrong."

"It's…broken."

It wasn't meant as an attack, but it hit Truewell anyway: a glance at her load-bearing gear showed the pouch for her radio crushed under the force of her fall.

"It just keeps getting better," Truewell exclaimed. "What is that beeping sound, anyway?"

Will's reaction was nothing so much as a clipped laugh, followed by a weary look at his wrist that only confirmed what he already knew.

"I'm almost out of air," he said.

"Take the mask off," Truewell said. "The fresh air is fine."

"We don't know that," he replied. "It hasn't killed you yet, but that doesn't mean…"

Truewell gave him a subtle look, the likes of which constituted a glare by her standards.

"You don't understand, Truewell," Will continued. "I'd love to pronounce it a miracle and dance the jig, but there's too many variables unaccounted for. There's a very real chance that you're going to die from exposure, sooner or later. If I take off the mask, I run the same risk. I'm not even sure if the filters would make any damn difference…and I'm tired. I'm really tired, Ruth, and I'm not sure if it's the stims or the running around or a symptom, but I can barely stay awake…"

"So your plan is to sit there and suffocate," she said.

"Oh, that's not…not the problem. I still have the backup bottle, you see, and that gives me another ten minutes, or something like that. So if you run and get the car, we should make it out of Paradise before my supply is completely empty. But every minute you're not looking for Madison, her chance of survival drops. Getting me to the base takes too much time, and you'd be nuts to go back into the hot zone afterwards…"

Truewell's next look was an honest-to-God glare. After a few pregnant seconds, she replied.

"Your radio works," she said, "establish contact with Berkut and the base. That should keep you awake. I'm going to get the car, drop you outside the town and go back for Madison."

"That's –"

"- and I'll be the judge of what's crazy around here, if you don't mind – _William_."

---

It was with no small amount of disbelief that Jaime found herself still hungry after wolfing down three hot dogs on the way from the BART station to the local FBI branch office. An impressive chunk of concrete and glass stretched before her, and sure steps led her to the front door of it. After wiping an errant spot of ketchup from the corner of her mouth, Jaime froze just a few steps shy of the door. Somehow, the thought of walking in there and pretending to be this secret agent character that gets casually waved through all checkpoints scared her.

With some more reflection, she might have figured out that the real nightmare scenario clinging to the back of her mind was trying just that, failing and being caught at it. As far as fears went, it wasn't wholly unfounded – she'd soon a lot of flash from Berkut, but were they really that connected? _Only one way to find out,_ Jaime thought, and at once hated herself for it. So many risks…

"Yes, can I help you?" the receptionist said, a bit before Jaime realized she was inside, standing at the reception. The look on his face said everything about how well Jaime looked the part she had been assigned to play, but faced with the challenge, Jaime stiffened her posture and hardened her voice.

"Jaime Sommers, DoD," she said. "I was told to report here."

"ID, please."

_And here's where it all falls apart,_ Jaime thought. _Oh well, might as well play it up. _With the barest hint of a smile, she reached into her jacket and produced her wallet. She would have found it reassuring if her hand had been shaking or slick with sweat, but instead it pulled out her driver's license and handed it to the receptionist with cold precision.

"One moment," he replied, and Jaime just stood there while the urge to jump through glass and run, run away homeward bound returned with a vengeance. Her breath slowed down as she shifted herself into a defensive frame of mind. What would the clerk do? If he went for the phone, it might be to call his boss and confirm her story…or it might be to call security. Or a gun, maybe…

_Grab__ target head and slam against counter for high-probability stun SHUT UP SHUT UP._

What the receptionist actually produced was a bound book from a drawer in his desk. It was about an inch thick and bound in cheap imitation leather, with a blank cover and a whole lot of thin pages within. He opened it to about 20 pages south of its middle, frowned briefly and began flipping pages in search of his goal. Even from the distance and the book being, from Jaime's perspective, on its head, she could see that it was essentially a long list of names, ID numbers and two columns for signatures. Jaime's own name, scribbled with a painfully average amount of effort, appeared on as the final entry on the page the receptionist stopped at.

"Ah, there you are," he said, then handed the driver's license back to Jaime. "If you could sign here…"

Jaime signed the column reading **Entered**. The receptionist nodded his approval and replaced the book.

"Your escort will be here in a minute," he said. "Don't forget to sign out when you leave."

"Will do," Jaime replied.

---

In Berkut's operations center, Nathan raised his hands off the keyboard and leaned back into his chair. The telemetry displays on his screen slipped from his attention just as surely as the rest of the world. He folded his hands behind his head and closed his eyes.

"You have arrived at your destination," he spoke into his headset. "Thank you for flying with Ambrose Air. Scream if you need me, I'll have a smoke."

Given that it was, effectively, a massive bunker, smoking inside the underground facility at Wolf Creek was in theory frowned upon. Nothing like a lit cigarette could make it into one of the proper rooms – air pollution aside, the fire risk was just too great. Fortunately, the architecture of the facility with its free walkways and modules suspended in a large hollow shaft made it easy to step "outside" and enjoy your tobacco there, but even that posed its own difficulties. The walkways just weren't built to accommodate people standing around, so a small group of social smokers would end up blocking a route fairly quickly. This was made worse by the choice of walkway sections that had received a full shell upgrade into hallways, namely the paths and nodes close to the modules, while the open sections almost invariably were the actual bridges from the central modules to the outer rings, and those were built very narrow indeed. It had gotten bad enough that some enterprising facility management types had started to strip some hallway plates for an unending "maintenance" task, but none of those unsanctioned smoking places was particularly close to the operations center – presumably to keep the janitorial staff well away from Bledsoe's hunting grounds.

And so those places were of no interest to Nathan; he was perfectly content to stop walking at a point where his bad conscience over blocking an important route was just outweighed by his unwillingness to walk large distances for a cigarette break. The latter had the additional bonus of keeping him close to his station for emergencies, so what he ended up doing was to find the nearest section with no shell and light up one of his cancer sticks. His lighter flickered in the air current; the positive air pressure system serving the bunker was a serious machine for serious business, and easily generated a noticeable updraft in the vertical shaft. Nathan replaced the lighter in his pocket and grabbed another essential smoker's utensil from the inner breast pocket of his jacket: a portable ash tray. He'd seen people fired over tossing ash or cigarette butts onto the roofs of the medical labs down at the bottom of the shaft.

Nathan's breath sucked a cloud of smoke into his lungs, where the particles of burnt tobacco lingered for a few seconds. The release came slowly, twin streams of spent air from his nostrils. His eyes scanned his surroundings, flicking from side to side like the carriage of an inkjet printer. His right hand kept fussing with the cigarette; his left arm rested on the handrail of the walkway, keeping him stable against the hunched-over leaning pose he had instinctively assumed, as if he was just slightly taller than the person for whom the rail had been put there.

The cigarette disappeared into exactly eleven applications of ash and a butt over the course of three minutes, during which time nobody joined Nathan and no words were spoken. It would be wrong to say that Nathan thought about something during those three minutes, for he was the kind of person who thought the least when he looked the most lost in contemplation. Only memetic primitives and desires haunted his mindspace: whether to have another cigarette, whether to fetch some chewing gum from his shirt, or whether to just stand there until someone needed him.

But instead he pushed off the rail and walked back to the operations center. The fun couldn't last – not when he was on the clock, at least.

---

Staff Sergeant Anton Olivetti walked up to Jaime Sommers's car as inconspicuously as a middle-aged man in black clothes could. The guard detail for the newest Berkut recruit had been hastily reorganized after the demise slash dementation of the previous candidates, and Olivetti was completely aware that as far as jinxes and short sticks went, being one of the replacements rated fairly high. His confidence was only backed up by two comfortable delusions: one, that he was just a better soldier than either Mendelson or Brown, and two, that lightning doesn't strike in the same place twice.

He wasn't even in plainclothes; the expectation had been for him to sit in the oh-so-harmless van across the street and just watch the neighborhood, not to go out and actually do things. But out he was, with a bug detector in his right hand, and it was one of those moments when he wished that the "practical" guard uniform for Berkut soldiers was just a little more practical – for example, not being completely pitch black. What was wrong with a nice charcoal grey? It would have blended better into the night, Olivetti thought, and it would have looked less ominous.

He finally reached Jaime Sommers's car (that dark green SUV thing; right plates, too) and crouched down next to it. Olivetti wasn't the world's foremost authority on electronic surveillance equipment, but attaching a tracker to the underbody of a car wasn't much of a stretch; therefore, he thought it best to check there first.

The bug detector was an inoffensive little doodad the size of a small paperback, with little to it but a power switch, a series of LEDs and a dial on the side. Olivetti flicked it on and dialed the sensitivity down until the unit registered no more noise. Then, he swept it under the car experimentally. The tracker was almost insultingly easy to find, slapped beneath the passenger side door with double-sided adhesive tape. Olivetti removed the bug, found its power switch and turned it off. The little red LED on it stopped blinking.

He was almost ready to stand up and walk away, but remained crouched. A tracker like this wasn't expensive – and the attachment method wasn't exactly secure. "Anything worth one bug is worth two bugs," he mumbled to himself, and grinned. That's the way he'd do it, he reasoned. The detector continued its route underneath the car, quickly honing in on another signal from near the rear. With a triumphant smile, Olivetti walked around to the back of the car and reached under the bumper to strip another flimsy bug from the car. What he found instead was a smooth lump, hard beneath his fingers. He was about ready to dismiss that as an actual feature of the car's underbody and retry his search with the detector when he noticed a flicker of movement across his field of vision. Before the lizard part of his brain could even tell him "sudden movement = bad", he felt something tighten around his neck.

Sara Corvus was behind him, exercising a textbook rear blood choke on the Berkut soldier. Her left arm around his neck, with his adam's apple in the hollow of her elbow. Her right hand – with the cool texture of a latex glove on it – brushing against the rear of his neck. The only move it left him was to ram his left elbow into her ribs, but that had no effect one way or the other on the strength of her stranglehold.

"Yeah, that's gonna work," she whispered mockingly, her voice trailing off into infinity as time slowed down. Olivetti's world went monochrome, then black, and he felt himself hit the ground.

Corvus evaluated the situation quickly. The bug in Olivetti's hands was hers; one of her better friends had managed to slip it onto the car at the gas station. It was a pity that it couldn't have lasted longer, but it had served its purpose well – now she had Jaime's home address, and that was sure to be useful at some point. However, she had no plans for home intrusion. Placing some more surveillance gear nearby without being noticed by Jaime or one of Bledsoe's men would be quite the triumph for the night.

The bug detector in Olivetti's hand was still beeping. Corvus looked over her shoulder one more time and then climbed under the car. Her sight faded to shades of green and white against the darkness beneath, but the source of the signal stood out against the reflective sheen of the car's metallic underbody. It was a small blob of hardened resin, with a plastic disk the size of a quarter inside. It looked more like a movie prop than serious hardware, but the detector clearly read a signal coming from it. It made Corvus wish for her expanded toolkit – maybe she could have fried the electronics inside with a degaussing wand and then safely brought it home for analysis, but the best she could do there was to pry it out with a knife and stay away from important places until she figured out a way to switch it off without destroying it. The resin blob was a tough number, but it yielded to combat knife after a few attempts, chipping hardened epoxy all over her when she pried the bug free. With a look of satisfaction, she pocketed the bug and made to leave.

She almost got away with it. When she climbed out from beneath the car, nobody spotted her or Olivetti's body, and for a few seconds it looked like she might have just walked away from the scene with nobody the wiser. She even had her strut going, her thoughts on something else, and a smile on her lips – and then, across the street, somebody slammed a car door three times in two seconds. Either that, or there were three suppressed gunshots.

Corvus didn't like that interpretation, but it made a lot more sense.

Keeping her pace steady, she rounded the corner of Jaime's apartment building and considered her options. The gray van was the obvious Berkut surveillance unit, and the probable source of the shots. The street illumination made it difficult to approach the van without being seen – if anyone was watching. She leaned out of the corner, fixing the scene with her bionic eyes: nobody in the front cabin, no windows visible in any of the rear panels. The alternatives were to circle around, or to climb the building and jump across the street. Both would take time and risk exposure. But damn it, the situation was just too unstable to walk away from – no telling what someone after Berkut's stooges would do if left alone.

In light of all this, just running across the street seemed to be the path of least resistance.

She opened her coat and emerged from the shadows crouched, quickly and quietly darting from the corner to Jaime's car, taking care to stay concealed from the van's line of sight. After a few more explorative glances up and down the street – still no witnesses – she broke into a silent sprint across the street, darting through the lights as if doing the 100 meters through a minefield. The twin shoulder holsters of her pistols jostled with her steps, heavy reminders of the simple answer to most any problem.

Deep breaths. Corvus considered the guns again. Easy. But she didn't want to wake the neighbors.

Inside the van, she found the bloody body of a Berkut man, headset still slipped over his head and stretching its cable from his position on the floor to the computer console he had been using. Somewhat more interesting than that was the living occupant of the cabin, an older man with flecks of silver in his short-cropped black hair, matched by a black business suit and leather gloves. The entire getup was so self-consciously "intimidating" that it caused Corvus to underestimate him for a moment. It was enough for him to notice her and bring up his pistol; Corvus pounced on him, deflecting his shot by breaking his wrist. With her second move, she grabbed him by the neck and slammed him to the ground, with the same effort one might use to throw a pillow.

"Hi," Corvus said chirpily, "who the fuck are you?"

The man died. Corvus knew at once that she hadn't killed him, but the situation didn't allow her to dawdle around. She released her grip on the agent and took a step back. There didn't seem to be a way to do anything to the van without further endangering herself. Berkut was most likely already in the process of sending reinforcements, and loathe as Corvus was to admit it, they never did seem to run out of soldiers. With just her pistols, she didn't like the odds of her versus a full helicopter of goons. She couldn't take the stranger with her, either, but perhaps it was best to simply let Berkut figure out who he was and take a peek at their answers later.

She jumped out of the van and walked away. The line of people who wanted something to do with Jaime Sommers was getting longer, and Corvus would have to take some time to rethink her strategy.

---

Jaime could only start believing that she'd actually successfully impersonated a DoD analyst when she had passed through the security checkpoint into the building proper. The man who escorted her – a Special Agent Finlayson – was smaller than her mental image of a Nordic person, though the rest of the stereotype seemed to be fairly accurate. Cheap suit, though.

"So, what brings you to the Earlmayer case?" he asked, his voice tinged with a pronounced "clean" accent that made Jaime think of an comedian's impression of a sober news anchor.

"Having it dropped in my lap three hours ago," Jaime improvised, in what she thought was a not-all-that-terrible Midwestern twang. "All I've been told is that you have files relevant to it. My boss wants it, so he calls me up and says 'You got a date, now go fetch'."

Finlayson let out a small chortle. "My uncle was a Pentagon clerk in the 70s. He never got any fun business trips, either."

_Look at this bullshit,_ Nathan's voice came. _Broadcasting their SSID, but not to worry, they've got MAC filtering! Yeah, __**that**__'s gonna keep me out. _Jaime deduced that he was completely aware of her current inability to tell him to shut up, and that naturally led to flagrant abuse of technobabble privileges. _I can't believe they've got this much off-peak traffic! Huh – only one client's getting it. Probably some idiot running a torrent. You know what? I'm gonna find out, and the betting pool starts here. My money's on bestiality. I can just imagine this fat, balding G-Man type who's got a thing for…_

"So, uh, you do this a lot?" Finlayson asked as they walked down a drab hallway to the elevators. "Travel around, put out fires?"

"Not really. I'm fairly new to the game," Jaime said. "This was supposed to be my vacation, too."

"Ouch," Finlayson replied, twitching as if he had been hit by a biff on his shoulder.

" Yeah, that's the Department for you. Everything's time-critical, national security, 'I want it done yesterday' crap."

"It's not so bad here," Finlayson said. "To tell you the truth, I'm a paperwork kind of guy. I know a lot of people who get here and want to bust down doors, but give me a quiet, routine case any day of the week."

"I know exactly what you mean," Jaime replied with a smile.

_Ah, to hear your bald-faced lies is a treat,_ Nathan's voice came. _You should be in theater, or running a real estate fleece. I'd buy a timeshare from you! If…if I was an idiot, because, you know, timeshare, but if you find yourself a sucker, I'll print the brochures._

After an uneventful ride in the elevator (except for Nathan's continued play by play of cracking the network wide open), Finlayson swiped his access card to let Jaime into the building's archives. It was a large basement room stuffed with double-sided shelves full of file binders, all mounted on a rail system to let the shelves be moved and thereby squeeze more files into the same floor area. Jaime had to admit that this was at least tangentially related to sniffing around in a library, and her mind painted a vivid picture of an old, dusty file, all carefully laid out in double-spaced typing with black & white photos paperclipped to the pages. Instead, Finlayson led her to one of the desks in the room, stocked with a proper desktop, paper and pens as well as a computer dating from the early Clinton administration.

"It's really pretty user-friendly," Finlayson said of the electronic filing system, the aesthetic of which Jaime lacked the words to describe as anything other than old. "You just type in 'Roger Earlmayer' over there, then you hit F9, it'll show you the record with full transcriptions. You use the Page Up and Page Down keys to scroll in it; it'll also give you reference numbers if you want to look at the physical files. Need anything else?"

"No, I'm good," Jaime said. "Thank you, Agent Finlayson."

"No problem. I'll be here all night, so when you're done, just buzz up to Zach with the phone and he'll call me."

Jaime craned her head around to look at the wall next to the entrance. Fire alarm, fire extinguisher, phone, emergency evacuation procedures and map. Very official. She wondered if there was a proper Federal Bureau of Investigation way to put out a flaming trashcan.

"Zach?" she asked.

"Oh, he's…"

"The clerk at the front desk," Jaime guessed.

"Ah, yeah! Right," Finlayson said, rubbing the rear of his neck with his hand. "Sorry, we get a little loose in the graveyard shift."

"That's fine with me. Now, I don't want to keep you…"

"Oh, that's alright!"

"No, really…"

"My current perp died last week," Finlayson said. "It's not like he'll run away. But yeah, I'll stop bugging you now. I hope you find what you need."

"Thanks, Agent Finlayson," Jaime said with a smile.

The FBI man waved a silent goodbye, then turned and walked out of the archives. Jaime let her gaze sweep the room once again.

_You alone?_ came Nathan's voice in her head. _Check if there are cameras in the room._

Jaime determined, to her satisfaction, that there were none.

"Okay, now what the hell am I doing here?" she asked, a bit more sharply than she had intended.

_Pretty good improv,_ Nathan said. _But really, I just needed you inside the building. Bledsoe figured you'd think FBI when he said federal building, I spiked the nav to make sure._

"Does anyone in this outfit know how to give me a straightforward, direct order? Go here, do this? What the fuck is wrong with you people?"

_Look, I get __**my**__ orders, and when Bledsoe tells me to jump, I, uh, I say that my doctor told me to avoid putting stress on my ankles, but…well, you get what I mean, right?_

"No."

_Oh,_ Nathan said. _But to answer your original question…_

"Thank you, Ambrose."

…_t__he FBI won't hand over personnel files to us without some heavy duty strings getting pulled, and we don't have the time to ask them nicely._

"Or at all," Jaime fired back. "But Berkut isn't good at getting permission, you guys just do things."

_Ah, but it's easier to ask forgiveness than get permission. Also, technically, we. Better get used to guilt by association, Sommers.__ You might as well enjoy the perks._

"Oh no. You're not turning **me** into a jerk, too," Jaime protested. "Now, this Earlmayer stuff, do we actually…"

_No. Call up the fil__es and look at them real hard for their computer logs, but other than that…take notes, make origami cranes, whatever. _

"Who is that guy, anyway?"

_Arms dealer. Likes the good life a bit too much. Don't worry, small fish, not our problem._

"…why are we hacking the FBI network again?"

_That's, uh, sorry, mission compartmentalization. Look, we got this, okay? And you did your part. Lean back__ and bask in the golden light of my brilliance._

Jaime Sommers rolled her eyes and sat down at the desk. After a moment of reflection, she buried her face in her hands and let out a deep sigh.

* * *

**Tech Commentary:** Wireless Security

First, to clarify, we'll only be dealing with Wireless LAN and RFID security today. You could cover eavesdropping on cellphone and radio conversations under the same banner, but let's leave those for another time.

When considering the security of WLAN, there are two basic approaches: restricting access, and encrypting content. Restricting access begins with a careful site survey to determine where the Access Point's signal can actually be picked up. Take note that, while most casual attackers may be working with low-gain "omnidirectional" antennas , passive signal sniffing can be done effectively with directional antennas that can pick up signals from great distances – with a clear line of sight and lack of interference, miles. Therefore, security-conscious users will try to reduce the signal strength of their Access Point to the minimum required to have the coverage they need. Paint, wallpapers and windows that are specifically designed to block radio signals in the 2.4 GHz band (where modern WLAN operates) are available, too. With enough of a budget, a wireless network can be built that covers an entire building floor yet radiates almost no useful signal to the outside world. Even in that case, however, one must still be wary of receivers brought into the building, either carried by visitors or hidden somewhere on the premises.

Two "softer" solutions are to disable SSID broadcast and enable MAC filtering. A network's SSID is used to identify it to the computers trying to access it; the reasoning goes that disabling broadcast will only allow computers to use the network if the user knows the SSID already. However, while this may stop casual scanning for networks, it doesn't actually hide the radio signals used, which can – if the attacker knows what he's looking for – be sniffed for data packets that contain the SSID. Once this happens, the attacker has the SSID ready to use and this feature becomes pointless. Similarly, MAC filtering only allows computers onto the network if their MAC address (a number designed to be unique for every piece of networking equipment) is specifically listed as having access – if your MAC doesn't match, you can't join the network. (This is what's called a "whitelist" security approach, by the way.) It can be defeated by sniffing for packets from a computer with legitimate access to the network and cloning its MAC address, which makes the attacker's computer indistinguishable from the one that was cloned, as far as the network infrastructure is concerned. However, if you actually start using this address, the cloned computer will receive a copy of all data you have requested and will discard it, having not actually sent the requests the network thinks are coming from it. If the volume of "unsolicited" data becomes high enough, this might degrade that computer's network speed to a noticeable degree, or – if it has a software firewall – trigger an alert about being subject to a denial of service attack. Either may tip off a clever/paranoid user that something is wrong.

Encrypting traffic on a wireless network is considered a necessity to establish any security – an unencrypted network is always in danger of simply having its packages sniffed passively, with no suspicious activity produced on the network itself. There are two acronyms to note here: WEP and WPA. Simply put, WEP is better than nothing, but where possible, a variant of WPA should be used.

To explain in more detail: WEP, or Wired Equivalent Privacy, was the first encryption standard widely used for wireless LAN applications. It uses a single key that must be known to all networked computers to encrypt all traffic through the network. Without that key, traffic can't be read or encrypted correctly. However, within months it emerged that the encryption algorithm was weak, allowing attackers to recover the key by sniffing the encrypted traffic and analyzing it. This requires several thousand network packets to be intercepted, which can take some time when passively sniffing a network with low activity. However, any network with high throughput can produce thousands of packets within a minute, and several outside attacks on a network can artificially induce high traffic, speeding up sniffing. So, why is WEP still in use? It is easy to implement and doesn't require much processing power, making it attractive for embedded devices that have to access the network. Further, some legacy devices may not support newer encryption standards. Furthermore, especially among private owners, widespread lack of knowledge and the perceived inconvenience of enabling security features on their network keep WEP or even completely open networks a common occurrence.

WPA, or Wi-Fi Protected Access, describes a small group of similar standards that are today considered adequate security for a Wireless LAN. You might deal with WPA or WPA2; the former is designed to be an easy upgrade for older hardware, the latter more secure. WPA can use the TKIP encryption algorithm; WPA 2 can use TKIP or AES (Advanced Encryption Standard). AES is considered superior, as TKIP has a known vulnerability that allows attackers to spoof some types of packets. Both WPA and WPA 2 support either a Personal variant (using a keyphrase, similar to WEP's setup) or an Enterprise variant that requires a separate authentication server. The "Personal" variant (also called PSK, pre-shared keyphrase) is vulnerable to brute-force attacks on that keyphrase, and dictionaries with common keyphrases exist to speed up this process. With recent advances in parallelizing attack algorithms and offloading them onto more suited hardware (the processors on graphics cards, called GPUs, are becoming popular), even a personal computer is capable of brute-forcing a simple keyphrase in days, and unlike other systems secured with passwords, the attack can take place without having to have direct access to the network. Simply having sniffed packets and trying to decrypt them with every possible keyphrase is enough.

Nathan's attack is against a WPA2-Enterprise system, which includes a separate authentication server in the network – a so-called RADIUS server. Among other technical details we won't get into, the key point of attack here is that RADIUS uses the MD5 algorithm to encrypt transmitted passwords. (Those are, in most configurations, simply the Windows passwords of the users.) MD5 is described as a hashing algorithm and is designed so that no two phrases will generate the same encrypted text (called a hash). However, it's not a serious encryption algorithm. With his privileged access to classified information, Nathan was able to generate a long master list of possible passwords built according to internal FBI recommendations; he then fed all those through MD5 and derived every possible hash. After capturing a few Access-Request data packets from the network (which contain both encrypted user names and passwords), all he had to do was compare his long master list against the hash in the packet and see if anything matched. (Of course, he also compared hashes of popular "private" passwords on the off-chance of finding a user who didn't follow policy. Yeah, what are the odds someone would choose a password that's easy to remember?) When the supercomputers at Wolf Creek found a match, Nathan could disguise his own access attempts as those of a legitimate user.

Depending on how complicated the user's password is, the attack's computational requirements range from "See WPA Personal, except even easier" to "If you don't know what a Teraflop is, don't even try". As for whether the user whose credentials Nathan stole was using a "secure" password or simply his wife's birthday: I'll leave that up to your imagination.

In conclusion: you wouldn't let an attacker plug his laptop into your cable LAN. Don't let them sniff the packets of your wireless network, either.

Finally, a look at the TransLink hack. While RFID (radio frequency ID) systems are becoming the new vogue in many applications, they are vulnerable (through little fault of anyone but the laws of physics) to certain attacks. One of the classics is the "Man in the Middle"-attack. Simply put, it requires the attacker to get between the sender and the receiver of a communication, intercept all messages and then send them to their intended destination. In this way, the attacker becomes capable of reading and manipulating the messages sent. All important communications are therefore routinely encrypted and hashed, which makes them hard to read for attackers and any attempts to change the message obvious. However, for simple applications, an effective attack can consist simply of recording the messages sent between two devices and playing them back at a time of the attacker's choosing.

The TransLink terminal queries for TransLink cards in the vicinity (and by in the vicinity we mean a distance no larger than a few inches); cards respond by sending a message back. The entire process derives most of its security from the extremely short distances involved – it's hard to pick up those signals without being noticed. One theoretical attack would be to replicate the query of the reader and walk through a station to collect the responses from nearby cards; similar attacks have been demonstrated against RFID-equipped passports, for example. However, all Nathan had to do to set this hack up was to keep a signal recorder close to his TransLink card when he swiped it once, and record the handshake between receiver and card. After that, he knows the right signal to send in response to the receiver's query, and can send it from any device capable of simulating an RFID chip, such as the antenna array in Jaime's bionic arm. This kind of duplication is called "cloning". After that, he never used the proper TransLink card again – the concept of carrying an electronic device he doesn't have full control over didn't sit well with him. (Also, he doesn't ride the BART much these days.)

However, this particular implementation of RFID won't actually let him cheat the system out of money: all that's encoded on a card is the account number it's linked to, not an amount of money. So even if he makes a perfect copy of his TransLink card, he's paying the fare. In fact, the only criminal activity possible on this system would be to hijack someone else's card and ride the trains with their money. Either way, BART gets paid. It's still illegal, though, and requires equipment and expertise far beyond any possible payoff.

As for why Nathan has a TransLink card and account – well, he was trying to impress his environmentalist then-girlfriend by pretending not to own a car and going everywhere by public transit. Unfortunately, the relationship only lasted until a particularly bitter discussion about the human cost of Coltan mining in Africa.


	9. Chapter 9

Hello, true believers! Here's Chapter 9. The bad news is, no Pope here, and no Pope in the next few chapters until after the action goes down. It just didn't work out, mea culpa. On the upside, this chapter's commentary is our first in-depth look at one of the bionic systems implanted in Jaime - the bionic eye. Read all about how it works its magic after this chapter. And if you have a account, why not post a review? Don't give me that "Man, you crazy" look. I watch the traffic counter. I can see you read this.

Yes, you, Adrien!

...come to think of it, that wasn't funny even when Yahtzee did it. So, er, just enjoy the show, guys!

---

Becca leaned back into the couch and looked up from her netbook. The TV showed infomercials, and to her surprise she found she had muted the device – not that she could have told the difference without the small symbol in the lower left corner of the screen. The clock on top of it displayed a time just past 11 PM.

Looking at the time brought the effort she'd spent on tracing a little nugget of information into sharp relief. Jonas Bledsoe, she had found out, was either too new or too small-time to be interviewed or featured by any legitimate business or tech magazines. That much, Becca found unsurprising - after all, if he was somebody, she would have heard of him, right? All the net dredged up (besides some guy on the south coast of Australia selling herbal supplements) were small features in equally small industry publications, a better vanity press for venture capital firms with more money than credibility. Jonas Bledsoe, dauntless innovator in robotics! The next big thing! Invest now! _Yeah, right,_ she thought.

One of the links led to an interview with the man; Becca clicked it with the joyless dedication of a cynical wedding photographer. Two pages of self-aggrandizement and softball questions leapt at her. Just for fun, she decided to scan it, see if she could divine something about Jaime's boss from his jabber. Next to a big, obviously staged picture of a going-on-60 man smiling and gesticulating, as if in mid-answer, her eyes stopped on a paragraph.

**"- you begin to realize that people want to do their thing, not your thing. Nobody wants to do your thing, except you. The best you can do is convince other people that helping you will help them. Money, mindshare, a line on their resume, everybody wants something. And I don't see anything wrong with that. I mean, I want something when I talk to you! *laughs* I want something from you. You want something from me. Everyone wants something. Understand that, work with it, and you'll go far."**

She had read that before. Not this interview, Becca was sure, and a look at her browser history backed that up. Not in this interview, but somewhere else. With her already twigged suspicion circuit working itself to a higher voltage, she copied the whole paragraph, opened a new browser tab and fed it through Google. _A-ha,_ she thought to herself as she waited for the results, _this will..._

The results came up.

_...do nothing?_

The search results showed the interview she'd looked at, blog posts quoting from it, and a veritable load of unrelated content. Had she seen it quoted? No, she hadn't, at least not that she could remember, but those words...the knot in her stomach wouldn't disappear, especially not after she realized it was there. The wrongness was blindingly obvious, yet utterly impenetrable. The rationalization machine in her head was rattling off lots of good to great explanations to no avail. Something, somewhere in her head, had pronounced Jonas Bledsoe to be too good to be true, and it would not rest until it had proof.

So Becca Sommers needed more information.

---

Dr. William Anthros lay on the grass of the Mayor's lawn, propped up against the fence, and desperately tried not to close his eyes.

The suit's computer still beeped incessantly, warning of the low pressure in his secondary escape bottle. As far as he could still think, none of his options looked appealing. He had only minutes of clean air left, was unsure whether he still had the gross motor skills to replace the air hose on his mask with a filter cartridge - and if he screwed up, the safety valve would let nothing through, at all -, and just ripping the mask off and enjoying Paradise air? Will idly wondered whether free-breathing Ruth Truewell wasn't lying behind the next corner, already choked to death on what might well turn out to be the deadliest airborne agent yet devised by man. Cheery thoughts, all.

But Will's secret weapon was about to fire again: a logical plan had been assembled in the backwaters of his brain, and after sufficient time to incubate, it broke through the surface of his mind fully formed. Radio Fleming on the remaining internal air supply with all details, then take off the mask before losing consciousness. That way, even if the air was deadly, he'd have gotten the word out, and not risked sudden death too early. From his addled perspective, the plan was positively brilliant - even more so as his brain glossed over the fact that this was pretty much exactly what Truewell had told him to do before leaving.

He switched his radio to the first frequency and held the transmit button.

"Sawdust 6, this is Eagle 1, please come in, over."  
A moment of silence was all it took for Will to imagine a wide variety of disasters befalling the camp. Had the wind turned? He imagined a cloud of death sneaking westward, overwhelming Captain Fleming's post within minutes. Or the explosion...Will had no experience with the practical application of explosives, and between distance and exhaustion, gauging its effect solely from the visible fireball wasn't going to lead to a conservative estimate.  
"Eagle 1," came the infinitely reassuring voice of Corporal Finster. "I'll get Actual for you. Stay on the frequency this time, out."  
"Heh," Will mumbled to himself, "dude knows me already."  
"This is Sawdust 6 Actual," Captain Fleming said emphatically. "I want a goddamn sitrep, Eagle 1!"  
"Over," Will said with a chuckle, then hit the transmit button anyway. "Eagle 1 sitrep follows: One survivor encountered, Madison Peters, whereabouts...no idea. On-site evidence corroborates organophosphate agent of unknown type, aerosol dispersal method. Current air seems to be...harmless, or with delayed effect. Eagle 2 is getting our car, got no comms with her. And I'm running out of air, so now's the time for questions. Eagle 1...over."  
"Say again after Eagle 2, over."  
"I said, we were both alive five minutes ago, until Eagle 2 almost died, and I saved her, and now she's off and I don't know if she's dead, but I'll be dead in a minute unless there's been a fucking miracle, a view I happen to be coming around to, so who knows," Will babbled. "Does that...that answer your question, Sawdust 6?" After a moment, he added. "Actual. Over."

If Will had been in a better frame of mind, we might have heard the sound of gnashing teeth even before Fleming started his verbal reply.

"Eagle 1, you must evacuate the hot zone now. My camp is swarming with CBIRF and they're begging me to go in. I need to know, Eagle 1, is level B safe? Over."  
"Level B..." Will said to the nice-looking fencepost about two yards from his left hand. In his defense, that post was really, really nice.  
"Eagle 1, come in! Is Level B safe?"  
Will pushed the transmit button one last time. "Level B is...sealed environment suits with autonomous air supply..." He took one last, deep breath. "Level B is safe. Eagle 1 out."

And then he pulled the mask off. The fresh air felt like being forced into a tub full of ice water for a few seconds, coolness carrying his sweat away for a terrifying moment before he dared to take a breath. It was a breath deep and satisfying enough that it was fit to be the finale, had it come to that - but after a few more experimental cycles of inhaling and exhaling the nitrogen-oxygen mix provided free of charge, he felt steadily better, with none of the alarming syndromes a lethal dose of nerve agent should have produced.

"This doesn't make sense," Will said. His next action was to reach into the folds of his pockets and retrieve the labeled plastic container from one. Another tablet, hard to swallow in his dried mouth, but eventually it went down. Will took more breaths and waited. His right hand hovered dramatically next to an autoinjector. And that was how Ruth Truewell found him, in the throes of a newly resplendent supply of mental energy and with a laser-like focus on the instrument of chemical counter-warfare in his hand. The car came to a stop in the gravel, and Truewell jumped out, leaving the engine running.

"Anthros! What are you doing?" she asked forcefully. "I suppose you were getting bored **not** phoning home. I did that, by the way. Berkut knows what's up, so I can evacuate you." She stepped in front of him. "Are you listening to me? Get in the car! I'll get you out, just like you wanted, and then -"  
"It has occurred to me," Will interrupted, "that neither of us should return here."  
"What are you talking about? You were wrong. You're even breathing the air. I'm alive, you're alive, Madison Peters is probably scared to death somewhere out there. Aren't you worried about her?"  
"Do you taste garlic, too?"

That was not on the proscribed list of responses Truewell had expected to her words; taken aback, it took her a second to find her voice again.

"Actually," she said, "I do," and just like that, it seemed like her apprehension regarding Will disappeared into a cloud of smoke, like a cheap psychological parlor trick. "What is it?"  
"Dimethyl sulfoxide," Will replied, and slowly rose from his sitting position. "Very good solvent; goes through many protective measures. Exposure frequently generates a garlic- or onion-like taste in human subjects."  
"So...the agent?"  
"Maybe a part of it," Will said, and as he reached a fully-upright status, he easily slipped into his gesturing lecture mode. "It might be a binary poison. DMSO, and something else...reacting together in the victims to release an extremely potent organophosphate compound. Mind you," he added, "it would be a very counter-intuitive bit of engineering, probably far beyond the difficulty of manufacturing even the best currently known chemical warfare agents. But I see no other reason for the sulfoxide to be in the air here. In any event, neither of us is dead, so I think that the other half of the agent is missing, for whatever reason. However, anything in this town - structures in particular - might still contain air where that half is present. If we breathe that, it would react with the DMSO in our bodies into its deadly form. Matter of fact, we may already have a sub-lethal exposure - you've breathed the air longer, but you also had the pralidoxime from the autoinjector in your system. But there's no reason we couldn't be adding to our exposure with every second in here, even if we stay away from likely hotspots. And I couldn't even venture to guess how fast such a reaction would proceed in human blood, so -"  
"So we're still in danger," Truewell said.  
"We need to get to a hospital, and fast," Will said.

---

What Jaime actually did in the archive room was to look up Earlmayer on the computer, read the case notes, then fish out the matching paper files and scan them. It wasn't the most interesting thing to do, sure, but it did pass the time. There was an idea in the back of her mind that kept bubbling up, to check if there were any files about her parents stored down there, but Jaime fought it down twice.

_What's bothering you?_ Nathan said, after a few blessed minutes of silence.  
"Hm?" Jaime replied instinctively.  
_You're an open book to me, Sommers,_ he said, _well, I guess more of a leaflet._  
"Ah," Jaime chuckled, "insulting my depth - and a literary theme, too?"  
_Yeah, I'm dialing it in, soon I'll have custom-tailored one-liners so devastating, they will completely...devastate you. But, anyway, back to my impeccable observational skills. I'm seeing some spikes here, you're thinking naughty thoughts._  
"Ambrose!"  
_Oh, no, not the 'FCC complaint' naughty, though if you do have those feel free to cut me in -_ Jaime rolled her eyes _- no, I mean, you're worked up over something you know is wrong._  
"I did mention my complaints about this whole operation, didn't I?"  
_Yep, different spikes still._  
"How many different possible spikes are there?"  
_Sommers, your telemetry is, like - complicated._  
"I love it when you're technical."  
_You want to do something. You know it'd be bad. What is it?_  
"Oh, fine, whatever. I thought I'd check if there are files on my parents. I'm fairly sure they were here for a few of the bigger protests back in the 70s. But then I thought, searching the computer would leave a trail, so I decided against it."  
_Be still my heart!_ Nathan joked. _So you do have a brain._  
"Well, if you're in control of the network -"  
_I am and I know what you're thinking, but the archive system doesn't seem to be on the main network. Stone age tech. Also, on the off-chance that somebody actually audits this thing in the near future and checks the access logs, they'd see me looking for Sommers files on the night you were here. So, no can do. Sorry._

That last word sounded oddly genuine.

"Worth a shot," Jaime said. "Alright, I'll buzz out and grab some food."  
_Cafeteria's on fourth, closed now but I'd bet they have some vending machines nearby. Try to grab some, uh, some vitamin B12. There's a lot of that in...liver. Ugh. Fat lot of good that piece of intel is, huh? I really don't like liver, I don't think anyone should eat it, ever, and, I mean, how would you - Oh my God. Oh shit. Now I'm thinking about liver from vending machines.  
_Jaime smiled at that. "I don't think they'll have that here."_  
No, not here! Our vending machines are boring. But liver? You know, they probably have that in Japan, little vacuum-sealed packages of sliced liver. __**Whale**__ liver, even. With a cartoon whale on the package, looking all happy and spraying a geometrically perfect fountain of sparkling rainbow water from his blowhole. He's fucking ecstatic that you're eating stale, overpriced parts of him. Everything comes from vending machines in Japan. Well, except dignity. They don't have the right mascot for it yet._

---

Standing in the elevator with Agent Finlayson was, as regards entertainment value, of the same mind-dulling quality as the first ride, its lack of mental stimulation seemingly independent from a) the number of rides and b) the direction of travel. (Of course, a more scientifically-minded field operative than Jaime might have insisted on a larger sample size.) Finlayson wasn't helping.

"So, did you find what you need?" he said. It wasn't just the phrase, or the delivery - everything down to his facial expression was the very model of unoriginality. Jaime got the impression that Finlayson was quite good at chaperoning visitors. He had the 'lulling them into compliance' part down pat.  
"I did," Jaime said, "but it'll take a while to sift through it all. I just thought I could use a coffee, you know?"  
"Sure."

Throughout the ride, the voice in her head continued to supply suggestions for various lethal and less-lethal takedowns of Finlayson. Jaime tried very hard not to make any moves that could set any of those in motion. And in this state of stillness, they made it all the way to the fourth floor of the building without incident. The doors dinged open with practiced cheerlessness, and Jaime stepped out into the gray hallway wasteland.

_Woah,_ Nathan said, _network signal is way strong up here._  
"Getting sick of the murderthoughts," Jaime whispered, "fix the hair-trigger."  
"Hm?" Finlayson inquired, stepping past her and stopping in his path. "Did you say something?"  
_I can get on that, but I need you to take some readings for me._  
"I said," Jaime lied, "I said I should fix my hair."  
Finlayson broke eye contact, as if that announcement had suddenly made looking directly at Jaime an act of shocking indecency.  
"You know, what with the economy class bun I'm wearing," she added.  
"I really didn't notice."  
"I had a minute to repair most of the damage at the airport," Jaime said, "but it could be better." She blinked. "You don't have to be too nice about it. I know I look like crap."  
"Uh, if you..." Finlayson stammered. "The restrooms are over there, if you wanna freshen up. I'll wait outside."  
"Thanks. You could get some work done, you know."  
"No, I really can't," he said, regaining some measure of certainty. "I can't let you walk around unaccompanied. I'm sure you guys at the DoD handle things the same way."  
"...yes," Jaime replied. "Yes, we do. I'm sorry, I'm still getting used to this visitor thing."  
"Ah, it's nothing, really. Take your time."

The restroom, then. Jaime's bionic eye detected a dullness to two of the three mirrors that told of long years of civil service; the one closest to the entrance seemed newer, if equally ugly. The ceramic sinks, the wall tiles and the hard plastic counters tying both together were all in slightly different shades of eggshell white; a color Jaime attributed to people who believed beige to be risqué. To her lack of surprise, it was empty.

"I'm alone," Jaime said. "What was that about the signal?"  
_The WiFi signal,_ Nathan explained,_ it's extremely strong._  
"Maybe they have better coverage here," Jaime said.  
_Uh-huh. Or maybe something is very wrong here. I've got a quick experiment for you. Raise your arm and wave it around._  
"And that will accomplish..."  
_Secondary directional antenna, gets me a fix on the signal source,_ Nathan said. _Come on, Sommers. Do it. Do some science for me._  
"Fine."

Jaime raised her right arm and after a quick admonishment that the signal source would probably be mounted near the ceiling, she kept it slightly raised. Several inappropriate history jokes suggested themselves.

"Ave, Caesar," was the one she settled on. "Morituri te salutant."  
_I don't know what you just said, but it's apparently distracting you from waving your hand, _Nathan said._ Okay, move a little, then do it again. Should be good enough to triangulate._

---

When Jaime left the restroom, Finlayson was waiting for her, leaning against a nearby glass partition and looking at nothing in particular. When he saw her, he smiled politely but looked apologetic.

"Well, what do you think?" Jaime offered, pointing to her slightly redone hair.  
"Looks good," he said, unable to actually tell any difference. "Listen, I'm really sorry, but somebody called my office phone and for some reason hung up before it could go to my cell. I need to check my phone and make sure it wasn't urgent."  
"Oh. In your office?"  
"Yes. I'm..." he began, looking unsure. "I can't let you in there. But the cafeteria is around the corner. You go get yourself a coffee, I'll meet you back here."  
"Well, sure. I really don't want to keep you from your work."  
"Don't worry too much about it," Finlayson said. "Everything's locked down anyway, you can't get lost. See you in five, okay?"  
"Alright!" she said with a shrug, watching as he hurried away.

_And there's your distraction, _Nathan said._ I gave him a call from the DoD central switchboard, it should take a while to sort out. Worst case, his call comes out here and I get to pretend to be your boss for a bit._  
"I see," Jaime said. "You copied his access card into my arm, didn't you."  
_Hey, I don't make the security holes, I just exploit them. Turn to your left, the signal source is somewhere down the hall._  
"What am I looking for?" Jaime asked. The fear of being discovered was back with a vengeance, but to her distaste she found herself acting with little hesitation anyway.  
_Wireless access point. _After a pause, Nathan added_ Small gray electronic doodad, about the size of a...small purse. Should be mounted to a wall just below the ceiling._  
"A purse?" Jaime asked, swiping her arm past a sensor pad next to a heavy glass door, which opened with a small green light and an even smaller beep. "Is that honestly the best size comparison you could come up with?"  
_You know, on second thought, it's about as big as a paperback..._  
"...let's go with purse."

What followed was the most nerve-wracking game of hot and cold Jaime had ever participated in, although Nathan's readings grew more accurate as she homed in on the signal source. Her path stopped outside wooden double doors, the hallmark of a larger room behind them. She was already working on explaining this to Finlayson, but so far the best she could come up with was to just run and jump through the next window - which, despite her survivability of such a stunt, still reeked of desperation.

_Kindly raise your arm...yes, it's still getting stronger, _Nathan said._ Must be mounted above the other side of the door._

Jaime swiped in once more, and a quick look upward located the perpetrator.

"So, uh, what exactly is the problem here?" she asked. "Is it defective, did somebody have too much to drink when they installed it, or is it Cylon espionage gear?"  
_The transmission power on it is cranked way too high, _Nathan said._ It could blanket most of this floor easily, and none of the other access points in the building are set like this, from what I can tell. I really only see one explanation here._

Jaime turned around. The big doors had led into a conference room, the kind with a large, round table in the middle and an old, too expensive flatscreen mounted on one of its walls. The large venetian blinds half-concealed a windowfront that opened to an amazingly restrictive view of San Francisco's city center. The room had been pilfered of its relatively unused chairs a long time ago, and a glance at the thermostat at the wall revealed it to be switched off. Jaime ignored that, but stepped closer to the windows. The darkness outside was behind glass and blinds, and so less than amenable to her eyes, but the right gears in her head turned nevertheless.

"The signal's powerful enough to spread beyond the building," she said. "In a room close to the edge of the building that hardly ever gets used. That has got to be deliberate."  
_Bingo,_ Nathan replied. _Bet you ten dollars you can pick up the network with a cantenna from across the street._

Footsteps behind her. Her body reacted.

Jaime felt her weight shifting backwards, as if she were to let herself fall, and then she dashed backwards into someone, slamming him against the wall behind her. His arms passed by her torso, his right hand holding a gun; Jaime's bionic hand snapped closed around his wrist, and she pulled it downwards, while her left arm flew backwards over her shoulder, driving her elbow into his face. With a spin, she seperated from the wall and dragged her dance partner with her, pulling her over her hip and off his feet. He sprawled onto the floor before her. Her hand easily twisted his arm and crushed his wrist, while her weaker left arm easily wrestled the gun away. She let go and dashed back again while the pistol transferred to her bionic hand. Within half a second, the man was on the ground, screaming in pain and disarmed, while she had his own gun aimed at him.

Jaime hadn't had enough time to process the situation. She recognized Finlayson before she even had the chance to wish that it wouldn't be him.

"No!" she shouted, trying hard to keep from doing anything more to hurt the agent. With a supreme effort, she forced her voice down to a growl. "I fucking told you to fix that!"  
_What the hell just happened?_ Nathan shouted back.  
Jaime glanced at the gun in her hand. _Fabrique Nationale Five-Seven, Caliber 5.7x28mm, 4.8 inches Okay okay okay_. The voice in her head was more intense, harder to shut out, and Jaime would have raised her left hand to her temples if her body had let her. All she could do was wince, and be told about the weapon's sound suppressor.

Wait. Suppressor?

"Finlayson!" she snarled. "He had a silenced gun!"  
_Shit! Where the hell do those rogue FBI guys come from?_  
"Guys? I break the wrist of a man who -" Jaime spared a glance at Finlayson, who'd retreated into a fetal position, clutching his demolished right arm - "who's trying to kill me for no good fucking reason, and you use a fucking plural! You knew about this!"  
_I swear to you, I had no idea -_  
"Don't lie to me," Jaime shouted, "don't you fucking dare lie to me!"

---

Nathan put the headset on mute and banged his hands onto his desk. He wasn't there to babysit Jaime Sommers. He was there for technical operational support. This - whatever this was turning out to be - wasn't in the job description.

The system worked its magic. It had entered combat mode, and it was very important that Jaime's emotions would not get the better of her, make her act in an irrational, unpredictable way. The spikes on Jaime's telemetry receded quickly, hot emotions checked and redirected with a heady combination of artificial neurotransmitters and minute electrical currents applied to the right regions of her brain. It made Nathan wonder how he could possibly calm down anywhere near as fast and keep helping Jaime out of this frankly horrible mess of a situation, but it also posed two more troubling questions: one, how would she have reacted without the psychological stabilization, and two, what if he'd been there in the room with her?

It was, perhaps, the first time that Nathan Ambrose was absolutely terrified of Jaime Sommers.

---

Jaime's anger wavered. It wasn't very strong to begin with, and it quickly crumbled under the assault of a tide of good feelings that washed through Jaime's body. For an instant, it felt like floating in tropical water, only the sound of waves splashing into distant shores in her ears. Her hand stayed on target, her heart beat, her breath was calm. The lights were on, but the owner had, just for a second, stepped out for smokes.

_Everything is under control,_ the voice in her head insisted with a disarming conviction. _You did just fine. Nothing is threatening you. You made the right choice._

"Ambrose?" Jaime said, and repeated. Finlayson wasn't innocent. There had been no indications that he would try to harm her, no opportunity to avoid this confrontation. And she hadn't hurt him too badly, anyway. After that moment of happiness, she was back where she'd left off - but coming into it gradually, it didn't seem so bad any more. Things were rapidly moving back into a frame where they made sense, where actions were reasonable and the consequences were bearable. Reality stopped trying to hurt her.

"Ambrose, please come in."  
_I'm here, Sommers,_ he finally said, sounding drained. _We need to figure out your next move._  
"Everything is under control," she replied. "But I'll need backup."  
_You got it. You'll have a whole strike team backing you up in ten minutes. Just stay cool, alright?_  
"Everything is under control," Jaime repeated.

Her eyes hovered over Finlayson like the sword of Damocles, and when he finally managed to fight through the pain and look up, his voice had somehow absorbed both his own pain and the shivering that was absent from Jaime's hand.

"There's still a chance," he croaked, "you can still be reasonable."  
"Who do you work for?" Jaime asked, calmly keeping his gun aimed at his head.  
"They will destroy everything here to get you."  
"Who do you work for?"

Finlayson's face contorted from a new rush of pain, then he fell limp and stopped speaking. The voice let Jaime lower the gun, told her that he had stopped breathing, told her to check on him.  
"Ambrose," she said, "I need instructions for emergency medical aid."  
_What? Shit, what happened?_  
She bowed down over Finlayson and untangled his limbs, spreading him onto the floor. Her right hand reached for his neck, and she placed her fingers on his carotid artery. There was no resistance from inside, no movement.  
"Finlayson lost consciousness, no pulse, no blood pressure, breathing has stopped."  
_Leave him._  
"Screw you," Jaime said, her voice still cool. "He's a human being and he has information. I'll give CPR until the medics are here."

She ripped open his shirt and positioned herself next to him.  
_  
That won't help, _Nathan insisted._ No consciousness and no BP means massive hypovolemic shock, and unless you see a big puddle of blood, that's all internal bleeding. I picked up a radio signal before you said he went out, so if I had to guess, I'd say he just got his aorta unzipped by remote command._  
Jaime sat next to Finlayson's body, feeling slightly dizzy. "Look, if I was talking to Will, I'd buy this. But how, exactly, do **you** know this?"  
_Remember the killswitch?_ Nathan asked, a hint of regret in his tone.  
"...what?"  
_Yeah, this is what we ultimately __**didn't**__ go with. But we looked into it. Even if you were in the middle of a hospital, there's not much you could do. He's dead._  
"...he's dead," Jaime repeated. "Someone pushed a button and he died."  
_Yes, _Nathan said_. Yes, that's all there is to it. I couldn't have created that, I couldn't have helped with it. It was just too...look, Sommers, I - oh thank you holy mother of Jesus!_  
_Miss Sommers,_ Jonas Bledsoe said. _It's time that I brought you up to speed on our current operation._  
"Operation, huh," Jaime said tauntingly. "The last time we spoke, it was still a situation, Mr. Bledsoe."  
_I didn't want to involve you in this. But we're low on options at the moment. The facts are these: there was an attack with an as-of-yet unidentified chemical agent on a small town in Idaho. Anthros and Truewell are there to investigate, but we have received a threat that another attack will be launched on a major city unless we hand you over before Midnight.  
_"What? Me, specifically? Who are these guys?"  
_Their knowledge of our operations is uncomfortably precise, yes, and we're fumbling around in the dark. This attack on you has convinced me of two things: Their 'major city' is none other than San Francisco, and they are very likely to succeed. At this stage, our only chance is to determine likely dispersal points for the attack, find their actual location and assault it. We have no heavy equipment, no additional personnel beyond the strike team that's already inbound, and no official cooperation with any other agency. And I can't afford to keep you benched for this. You're the only shot we have, Miss Sommers._

Jaime looked at the dead Finlayson, then the gun in hand, then at the night outside the windows. She whispered the only thing that could possibly sum up what she felt.

"...fuck."

* * *

**Tech Commentary**: Bionic Eyes

Let's talk about Jaime's and Sara's artificial eyes for a bit. To explain the basic functionality, we'll start from the very back and work ourselves to the front.

Analogous to the biological retina, the back of the bionic eye is covered in an active pixel sensor array, which is a quite modern semi-conductor-based light sensor. With its high native resolution, the array is capable of producing images that are much more detailed than a normal human eye could perceive. However, if the array stood by itself, it would only generate a grayscale image. Why? Because light sensors react to a (relatively) wide spectrum of incoming light. The human eye has specialized sensory cells that are tuned to specific wavelengths of light, but light sensors need additional filter hardware to deal with this problem. In general, what you end up with is a very fine mesh of color filters that make sure each individual sensor in an array only gets light of a specific wavelength. In digital cameras, a combination of individual sensors covering all color types (typically three colors) may be referred to as one pixel. Additionally, cameras include an infrared filter to block near-infrared light - if you've handled a digital camcorder, you may have seen that it has a "nightvision" mode, which simply moves that infrared filter out of the optics arrangement to let in more light.

However, the bionic eye does not have fixed filters of this kind. Instead, multiple layers of adjustable optical material are positioned in front of the raw sensor array. Each layer can be dynamically configured to change its optical properties to only let a narrow wavelength of light pass through, and to do so in a (relatively) freely choosable pattern. In normal vision mode, those filters essentially replicate the properties of the color filters found in modern digital cameras, but with the large frequency response of the active pixel sensor array and the adjustable filters, a lot of interesting tricks are possible, among them two separate types of "night vision". We'll cover that later.

In front of the filters comes the meat of the bionic eye, the optical medium. This is a thick, transparent liquid that reacts to small electrical potential differences by changing its optical properties. Through very small, embedded electrodes, the optical medium can be manipulated to bend incoming light like a system of lenses. Aside from taking care of focusing the eye at what its user wants to look at, this system also allows for a zoom of up to 4x. (A digital zoom of up to 20x is available on top of this, at the cost of progressively worse image resolution.)

At the front of the eye sits the "iris", which is chiefly made of two layers: another light filter and a small display. The light filter here is not there to shut out wavelengths or block patterns - it works as a shutter with adjustable opacity of its window. The shutter function is analogous to that of a camera or the human eye, determining the aperture of the optical system and thereby affecting issues such as how much light can enter the eye and how much depth of field is available, i.e. how large of a distance differential the eye can "focus" on. The adjustable opacity works to reduce glare and light-flooding issues, essentially equipping the user with adjustable sunglasses for their bionic eyes. The sensitivity of the APS array is such that a relatively large opacity has to be constantly used in daylight situations, which necessitated careful engineering of the tinting matrix to ensure that it dampens all wavelengths in a predictable way to prevent color aberrations between different lighting situation. At its most extreme, the iris can become completely opaque - this is used to protect the optics behind it from damaging levels of direct light. In recognition of the origin of this feature from Cold War-era specifications (for, at that time, still completely theoretical technology), this is referred to as "anti-flash", as it was intended to protect against the immense light exposure of looking in the direction of a nuclear explosion without further protective eyewear. (The concern for protecting an augment's bionic vision even during a nuclear exchange can today, perhaps, be dismissed as "overly optimistic".) Still, the feature proves its worth when it comes to shielding the optical system inside from intense laser light, either from outside sources or the onboard laser system.

The iris display is aimed outwards and chiefly responsible for disguising the true nature of the bionic eye. It generates a detailed image of a biological iris to make the eye look "normal". Interestingly enough, the display can be easily altered to display any given iris pattern, to quickly change eye color or even imitate a specific person's look. The display covering the center "pinhole" has to be as transparent as possible in its inactivated state and is of lower capability than the outer ring, but can be called upon to project a retinal pattern that can fool most automated sensors - again, this does not have to be the user's natural pattern, and so this feature can be very useful for supplying falsified biometric data. As a final point of interest, the outer ring display can, in theory, be used to display pretty much anything that will fit on it, so it is possible to imitate unnatural eye colors, show images or even display short messages.

The outermost layer of the bionic eye is the hard shell that protects every exposed piece of its surface. It is made of sapphire glass, a very hard and scratch-resistant material of superior optical quality, grown as a single artificial crystal under strict clean-room procedures over a time span of weeks. What makes this cover really special is that it is strategically doped with Titanium atoms to provide a very compact laser emitter arrangement. The main laser, however, is not integrated into the eye due to space and heat dissipation issues. Instead, a waveguide channel is built into the eye crystal that can be aligned with its counterpart in the artificial orbital mount of the bionic eye when it is aimed straight ahead. To use the laser, the eye remains locked in this position and enters anti-flash mode to protect the delicate optics inside from the intense light being channeled through the outer surface. The actual laser "engine" is situated in the subject's chest and connected to the eye via a flexible optical fiber that is run through the spinal column up into the head. The sapphire crystal merely redirects, focuses and finally releases the pre-generated laser beam (also boosted from its journey through the fiber's length by careful optical engineering). The laser in Jaime's bionic eye is rated for up to 150 milliwatts of output - this is enough for signaling, rangefinding and target designation purposes, but obviously far short of what is needed for long-range operations or even destructive purposes. (However, it is powerful enough to be of potential use in temporarily blinding targets at short range, though obviously this should be done only as last resort to avoid exposing people to progressive damage to their retina.)

As for the promised "night vision" modes, the bionic eye offers two. The first utilizes a starlight scope approach: by simply disabling color filtering, widening the iris and reducing the tint to minimum, much more of the available light can be processed into an image. Although this would, in theory, produce a grayscale image (akin to natural human night vision, albeit much more sensitive), projections showed that the resulting visual was somewhat confusingly close to the other night vision mode. As a response, the image is post-processed for clarity and tinted green. This produces an image resembling the more well-known "night vision" images generated by image amplification tubes, whose rather bulky and energy-intensive process eludes efficient miniaturization at this time. Projections show, however, that this not only makes the vision mode distinctive, but also makes its function instinctively clear - a rather extravagant bit of user interface design. The second mode reconfigures the filters to pass short-wave infrared light at the extreme of the active pixel sensor's array sensitivity. While this does not take full advantage of the arrays' power and only superficially resembles proper "heat vision", short-wave infrared easily passes through many atmospheric condition such as fog or haze, allowing the user to see clearly through weather that can make other vision devices all but useless.

So, with all this in a device smaller than a golf ball...do you have trouble believing that it's one of the most expensive single bionic components? (And we'll not even consider the armored orbital mount, partial skull replacement, laser installation and eye-brain-interface troubles that came with it when Jaime got her bionic eye. Maybe another time, though!)


	10. Chapter 10

Hello, true believers! Welcome to Chapter 10 of Paradise Regained.

It's well overdue, but I really need to give a shout out to my man Kasey "Punkey" Kagawa, who's invaluable for research, plotting and second opinions. The story wouldn't be half as good without his efforts.

Also, you might have noticed that I've reduced the ratings on both this and Rebuilt. Transparent ploys to attract more readers aside, the original ratings were pretty much insurance when I didn't know precisely how far I was planning to go, but after nearly a year of writing for this, I feel like I'm not going to places that need the high rating. If I ever do end up with something that I honestly consider above and beyond, it'll get the higher rating, of course.

This chapter, the commentary is about chemical weapons, with VX in particular. Yes, I'm going to make you all suffer along with me. (If you haven't already given in and read up on the topic by yourself, that is.)

---

Through a decontamination shower and changing into normal clothes, Ruth Truewell's mood had been elevated greatly to just below neutral. To judge from the shouting from another tent, William Anthros had proven rather more combative in the process, now riding a distinctly unpleasant spike of his experimental nootropic cocktail. Truewell had to keep reminding herself that those were extremes of emotion, not the pleasant base state she usually had as a co-worker, but it wasn't easy. Then again, seeing people at their worst was an established occupational hazard of being a psychologist.

The shouting stopped for a moment, failed to resume for another few seconds and finally left the scene completely with Will's entry to the same; despite hitting the shower later, he was already fully dressed while Truewell still had her shoes ahead of her. His hair was wet and slicked back, dripping on his shift, and he wore an expression on his face that his grandmother would not have approved of.

"These idiots!" he exclaimed, standing around like he didn't know which angry gesture to make first.  
"What, exactly, is the problem?" Truewell asked diplomatically.  
"They will not allow me see Agent Brown's body," Will said. "That much I found merely puzzling, but when I asked why, they said it was flagged for national security reasons. When I asked what they did with it, they said they zipped it up with the victims of his spree and will ship it off in the morning, God knows where, because - and this may come as a bit of a shocking twist - national security! When I begged that they at least put the bodies on ice, they said they have bigger problems! Bigger problems, Truewell? Brown's remains are the best evidence we have and the body could rot away under their noses for all they care! But God forbid I spend three minutes looking at him. That, they were very insistent on."  
"You know," Truewell countered, "they probably don't even have enough ice for one, much less all of the bodies here."  
"I'm not exactly expecting the US Army to drop everything at once and send twenty tons of medical supplies right this second," Will fired back. "Just a fundamental willingness to do the expedient! At this rate, they will transport the bodies all the way to the South Pole for the autopsy, perhaps even by train! But apparently I am the sole fly in the ointment for insisting that the bodies be examined now - which, I concede, is of course fully secondary before the need that everyone involved can point at orders and abdicate all responsibility!"

_Secondary syndrome,_ Truewell noted, _talks like 50s movie scientist._

Truewell retrieved her cellphone and headset from a bag; Will followed her lead wordlessly, now properly keyed-up and perceptive enough to read her intentions. Within the minute, they were back in contact with Wolf Creek.

"Truewell here," she said, skipping the pleasantries. "Brown's dead and we have no access to the body. Marines are getting ready to go in, I've briefed them about the girl. What's our next step, Sir?"  
"Anthros?" Bledsoe asked.  
"I'm here," Will said.  
"Our best guess places the attack threat in San Francisco. We have nine minutes downtime before we can send a helo anywhere. In that time, I want to narrow down our search grid. Anthros, are we sure it's airborne?"  
"About 95% confident," Will replied. "You are asking where I would release the contagion, yes?"  
"For maximum damage. The attack in Paradise was sub-capacity, but I have no reason to believe that they will pull another punch."  
"You could utilize air current analysis," Will suggested. "This would show the most efficient deployment of airborne chemical weapons. The DHS has collected this data for just such a terrorist attack scenario, I believe."  
"Sounds good," Bledsoe said, "we'll run with that."  
"There are two important limitations. One, it's weather-dependent. Two, it's agent-dependent. The former can, I suppose, be compensated for, but our knowledge of the agent's chemical structure and physical properties is still essentially nil."  
"When we drove back," Truewell added, "you talked about DMSO."  
"But that is not the agent!" Will insisted. "Aerosolized dimethyl sulfoxide explains a...symptom, Mr. Bledsoe, but it's far from the only possibility."  
"Can you run tests for it?" Bledsoe asked.  
"We have the portable lab and a handful of samples," Will said. "So, yes, we can test for it."  
"Good. You do what you can as fast as you can, we'll try to build a simulation for DMSO spread in the meantime. If it comes up as something else, we'll just have to run another shot. Questions?"  
"How's Jaime?" Will asked.  
"Miss Sommers is just fine, Anthros," Bledsoe shot back. "Anything relevant to this situation?"  
"We'll get right on it, Sir," Truewell said. Will failed to protest.  
"Good."

---

Jaime sat crouched against the next wall and stared at Finlayson's body. Her right arm rested on her knees, and her hand - still holding Finlayson's gun - drooped down, lazily swinging to a 4/4 time rhythm. She vainly tried to access the fear, the anger or the bliss she'd felt just a minute ago; all that came through was a vague sense of unease, like watching a mother three tables over try to control her unruly children in a fancy restaurant. There was no nausea, but Jaime wondered idly if, maybe, she'd feel better if she threw up.

"This is driving me nuts," she said to herself, then deliberately looked away from Finlayson and raised the gun. "Alright, lay it on me_._ Better than sitting around."

The system obliged. _Fabrique Nationale Five-Seven, Caliber 5.7x28mm, 4.8 inches of barrel, 20 round magazine. Removable sound suppressor attached. Magazine estimation: full. To begin automated tutorial, place both hands on pistol grip. _Jaime moved her left hand up, hesitated, then completed the grip. The voice returned, with a slightly enthusiastic tone Jaime found easy to hate. _The automated tutorial can instruct you in how to fire, load, unload and field-strip this weapon. To prepare this weapon for firing_ - "Tell me how to unload it," Jaime said. _To unload the weapon, press down on the magazine release button. You will find it on the left side of the grip at the base of the trigger_ _guard. After removing the magazine, rack the slide backward to clear the chamber, then - _"Yes, great. I can take it from there."

The magazine easily slipped into her hands; the long hours of drills at the range suddenly seemed a little more useful. Jaime tucked it into the left pocket of her pants and racked the slide roughly; the single cartridge jumped from the gun's chamber and tumbled to the ground to Jaime's indifference. She looked at the gun's left side to locate the decocking lever, but as the voice helpfully recounted the various controls (vaguely similar to her own SIG), this particular feature seemed to be a no-show. But at least she'd gotten all of the bullets out of the gun, and that gave her enough peace of mind to grab the suppressor and twist it; it unscrewed easily enough, and after a few moments Jaime was left with just the bare gun.

_While we're waiting, _Nathan's voice suggested,_ think you could search Finlayson?_  
"He's dead," Jaime said. "I'm not rifling through a dead man's pockets."  
_It's not like you're looting him for cash and valuables. A cellphone, receipts and IDs in his wallet, we could use those. But if you would rather face imminent doom with __**less**__ information..._  
"Okay, fine, I'll do it," Jaime replied.  
_I really do appreciate your enthusiasm._

Jaime walked over to Finlayson and crouched down next to him, gun still in hand. It felt like she should be wearing gloves for this, but as long as she wouldn't have to touch his skin, it would be - tolerable. Jaime tucked the pistol into the back of her waistband; her left hand reached for Finlayson's jacket.  
_I totally get that feeling, by the way,_ Nathan piped up. _It's the lack of movement and breathing. Makes him look just slightly off. Welcome to the Uncanny Valley._  
"Ambrose?"  
_Ever alert and at your service, Madame._  
"Just - let me work."

An idea flashed into existence in her head. Jaime took off her own jacket and laid it over Finlayson's head; after a few breaths, the impression of talking to him not ten minutes before began to fade. The body slowly slipped from "human" to "object" on her emotional compass, and eventually it looked enough unlike Finlayson for her to proceed.

The wallet in his slacks was light on coins, but well-stocked with twenty dollar bills.  
_Yuppie food stamps, _Nathan said._ Imagine my surprise._  
"Less running commentary, please," Jaime said through her teeth. "And - can you see everything I see? All the time?"  
_Only snapshots. Can't spare the bandwidth for video in a decent quality. _After a moment's pause, he added_ Let us postpone the inevitable privacy debate slash you tearing me a new asshole until after we stop the attack, alright?_  
Jaime rolled her eyes. "Let there be spaces in your togetherness," she replied with an entire hintbook of annoyance.  
_I like that. Who said it?_  
"Ask your parents."  
_...was it Tupac?_

Another pocket yielded Finlayson's cell phone; Jaime flipped it open, and after a little struggle with the keypad lock, she searched the call log. _(415)843-0952, 1419 Powell Street, San Francisco, California, 94133. (512)435-0931, disposable cell phone, Oakland, California. (512)733-6331, Benny's Pizza, 1735 83rd Avenue, Oakland, California, 94621._ The system worked quickly; as fast as she could read the numbers, the voice filled in the results of reverse lookups and added the results to her navigation. But none of those numbers were particularly useful at the time, save perhaps the pizza delivery. The SMS inbox was a different matter, though: the last incoming message from three hours ago simply read "Jaime Sommers, KR2P5F".

_Isn't that - _Nathan began.  
"My car's license plate," Jaime said, and her face couldn't decide whether to become pale or flushed with red. As fast as her fingers allowed (and that was fairly fast), she browsed the outgoing messages. The fear and anger she had missed were back; the bliss was still a no-show. "That's my address! They know where I live!"  
_That's not good, _Nathan said, for lack of anything more prosaic on his mind. _Just...hold on, for a second. Things are crazy around here right now._  
"I'm leaving," Jaime said. She dropped the phone and made for the exit. "I need to see that Becca -"  
_Don't do that - Sommers! - we need you for this, remember?_  
"For what?" Jaime shouted; the anger rose quicker than before. "So I can go get more people killed?"  
_Sommers! Don't do this!_ Nathan pleaded.  
The anger in Jaime boiled, and as it did it shifted from a cauldron of pitch to a crystal; it became cold and focused. "Just shut the hell up," she grunted.

She was almost at the door when Jonas Bledsoe's voice returned. Jaime thought she heard Nathan say "Double save".  
_Your sister is safe, _he said._ But if we had known that they found out where you live, we could have prepared better._  
"Oh, and how exactly..." Jaime began, but her swing stopped when she parsed the second sentence. "Prepared for what?"  
_I just spoke with Sergeant Olivetti, one of the men assigned to your protective detail. He and Sergeant Frye intercepted an armed man on the way to your house. Sergeant Frye was wounded when they intercepted him, and the man died in a way Olivetti described as similar to your experience with Special Agent Finlayson. I've arranged for a medical pickup for Frye through an...unaffiliated service, but the important part is that the attacker never came close to your sister.  
_Jaime forgot how to breathe for a second. When she remembered, her next words were unsure. "That..."  
_Unfortunately, we can't send any reinforcements at this time, but Olivetti's primed and ready to prevent any further attempts on your home.  
_"That is good," Jaime said. "But it won't stop the terrorists. They're going to kill the entire city, right?"  
_Not on my watch they won't. With your help, we __**can**__ stop them._  
"But that's just it. I can't help you. I barely know how to use a gun. And even if I did, I'm not going to shoot one at people."  
_I have four well-trained soldiers in the helo for that part, should it come to that. But you're smart and flexible. You learn fast. That's exactly what we need in an unpredictable situation like this._  
"That and 78 million dollars of military-grade human augmentation technology?"  
_It might come in handy._  
"Alright," Jaime sighed. "You're right. The last two days I've done things I thought were flat-out impossible. Maybe I'm good for a few more miracles. You've held up your end of the deal - if nothing else, I owe you. And I don't want to walk away when I could have made a difference. So I'll do it."  
_I want you to remember that,_ Bledsoe said. _That you can make a difference._  
"For they conquer who believe they can," Jaime said. "But if I get out of there in one piece, we're having a talk about the security detail at my home. No more close calls like that."  
_You'll get it,_ he said, and it sounded as good as the man's word and his handshake. _Two minutes until the helicopter arrives. Get to the roof for the rendezvous. The helo can't land on the roof, but it'll be close enough to jump._  
"Let's get this over with, then."  
_Good luck, Miss Sommers._

Alone with her thoughts again, Jaime looked at Finlayson's body on the floor. With a few quick steps, she walked back to him, bowed down and grabbed her jacket off him. Her next stop was the door again; Jaime stood on her toes, reached up to the wireless access point and yanked it off its mount. It was just small enough to fit into one of the outside hand pockets on her jacket. She opened the door and felt her jacket scrape up against the grip of the pistol; Jaime retrieved it from the back of her waist and looked at it. _Fabrique Nationale Five-Seven, Caliber 5.7x28mm _"You can shut up now," Jaime said. She dropped the gun on the floor and left it behind on her way to the elevator. She felt just a tiny bit better without it.

---

"I need a table!" Will shouted, carrying the mobile lab in his left and the Paradise samples in his right hand. The tent he'd trundled into was - in theory - the mess, but that didn't matter to him. Truewell followed his mad dash, silently pointed out an empty table at the far end and made apologetic hand gestures to the handful of soldiers inside.  
"I'm sorry," she said, hardly audible over the noise of Will slamming his instruments onto the table. The grunts merely glanced at Will's frantic actions and decided that yes, that other table all the way back at the entrance would make for a better location after all.

Truewell barely had time to watch them move when Will's list of demands pierced her eardrums.  
"I need three blood samples and the air filter!"  
"We didn't take the air filter," Truewell said, doing her best to comply with the rest of his bark.  
"Why the hell not?" Will demanded. "I've been going on and on about how important the air filter is!"  
"But you didn't take it," Truewell said. "You were there the whole time, and when I came back with the car you rushed us out of town."  
"Hmpf!" was Will's response, and the best he could muster with most of his brainpower on a different task. "Blood sample one shows severe AChE inhibition."

Will briefly froze in his actions. With a few button-presses, he started a new analysis.

"...but it's negative for phosphates," he said after another beep from the lab.  
"So, what -"  
"Let me think!" he said. "It's got to be an organophosphate, it's too strong for any other inhibitor. I need to run this on the other samples, too."

Two more ports opened, two more sample vials inserted, a lot more buttons pressed. While the lab churned, Will looked at Truewell, who fixed him with a disapproving glance.

"What is it now?" Will demanded.  
"The only reason I'm next to you and not saying anything is because your usefulness outweighs your attitude, Dr. Anthros," Truewell said. "But your attitude is rapidly gaining weight."  
"Look, Truewell, this is a goddamn crisis. Someone has to take charge here, and I'm -"  
"- the only one who's qualified? I've no doubt. But then, that's just how you like it."

The lab-in-a-box beeped.

"Same results for blood samples two and three," Will said. "This is a hell of a time to analyze me, Truewell."  
"I believe in discussing behavior patterns while they're extant. What's next?"  
"Testing for DMSO. Look, Truewell, I know I can be a little abrasive."  
"It's not just how you say it, it's why you say it. You've got a rockstar attitude. You're the only one who knows what he's talking about, everyone else is an idiot until proven otherwise, and they should all just do what you say, anyway."  
"Borne out by experience. Most people don't know what they're talking about," Will said. Beep. "Positive in all samples. Hmm, what about anthrocyte remains?"  
"You think only the mayor had nanobots in his blood?" Truewell asked.  
"It's a theory. That would explain how he survived this long, I've designed anthrocyte species that can bind organophosphates." Beep. "Hmm, osmium and iridium traces. Not the same signature as the mayor, but it's there. So much for that, then." After a moment's thought, he added "I need a skin sample."  
"But you do realize that this isn't making you any friends, don't you?" Truewell said, handing another sample vial to Will - this one filled with a small amount of skin scrapings from the victims in the store. "You walk into a room with a negative attitude towards everyone. And when that leads to a bad outcome, you just interpret it as another reason not to listen to other people."  
Beep. "Skin is positive for anthrocytes, same signature as the mayor. This...hm. Conjecture. Neither of those is the original agent. We're saying two different reaction paths."  
"One for the agent by itself, the other for the agent plus the trigger?" Truewell guessed.  
"Sounds like a hypothesis," Will replied. "Do we have other liquid samples?"  
"Some water from the sink," Truewell said, handing Will the corresponding vial. "So, is this making sense to you?"  
"A little. The thing is, playing nice never worked for me." Beep. "Mayor-type nanotech and DMSO. It should have triggered...but no. This type can't trigger anymore. This is decayed."  
"The sample **is** from water," Truewell said, "not blood."

Will gave her a crooked glance.

"Well, what about us, then?" he said. "I need a sample of your blood."  
"...that will take a moment," Truewell said warily, eyeing the nearest bench for seating. "Any progress on the DMSO front?"  
"It's there, but - did you take an air sample?"  
"Yes, it's - there." Truewell pointed to the right vial, being too busy combing the medical kit for an adjustable strap to continue handling the samples. Will hooked the vial into a free port; there were only two ports left, even with the judicious use of different sample vial sizes. But that was the price to be paid for compactness: he'd just have to send this unit off to be refurbished and grab another one for the next deployment. After all, what's a ten thousand dollar refill between well-funded government agencies?

While the lab did its duty with a steadily shrinking supply of reagents and unspoiled lab chips, Will grabbed a venipuncture kit and crouched next to Truewell. She had used the time to roll up her sleeve and tourniquet her arm; his right hand, bearing a plastic sleeve with a needle, hovered close to the hollow of her elbow.  
"You could have tested the air for DMSO first," she said. He sprayed a fine mist of disinfectant onto the skin around the target site and wiped it with a piece of surgical cotton. "That was your theory, you could have proven it with one test."  
"This will hurt a little," Will replied, and slowly inserted the needle into her median cubital vein; Truewell didn't flinch. "That would have proven airborne DMSO, but not its connection to the operation of the weapon. If the weapon's mechanism had nothing to do with it, I wouldn't have found out that way. You see, science isn't about proving your wild guesses right. It's about killing your darlings."

He inserted the first vacuum vial into the plastic sleeve; blood flowed into it. A measure of confusion broke through Truewell's professional mask.

"Falsify the null hypothesis," he explained. "Take a big sledgehammer to your assumptions. In my experience, humans crave elegance and simplicity. We look for patterns, narratives, just-so stories and few words that explain many things. Unfortunately -" he switched the vial for a second one - "reality is messy. And more often than not, we guess wrong. The worst thing you can do is to be loyal to an obsolete idea. If it doesn't work, it has to be changed."

Beep. Truewell kept quiet. There was no need to engage William Anthros's thought process all the time, especially not when it took a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

"But then, I don't think I have to lecture you on psychology. Hold this for a moment," Will said, then walked over to the table with the lab. "Positive for DMSO in the air sample. Alright, that just leaves the blood."  
"Most people don't like being wrong," Truewell said, reaching for just enough of his words to ground the debate. "They prefer certainty."  
"Certainty is an illusion," Will said; he took the second vial of blood out of the sleeve, pushed another piece of cotton onto the puncture site and slowly withdrew the needle. A quick move discarded the one-use device. While he kept the pressure on the small wound, he loosened the tourniquet above Truewell's elbow. "All you can draw from a finite amount of data is a degree of confidence. And it's not like we have to throw away everything every time we're wrong. Usually you find that you were on the right track but off on the details. And you know you are getting closer to the truth. That always cheers me up. Keep your finger on that for a minute."

With a click, the second vial of blood slotted into the last unused port on the lab; Will hammered another analysis sequence into the machine and set the daemons to their task.

"Do you like lecturing people?" Truewell asked.  
"Hm? Oh, I guess. I keep doing it, anyway."  
"Thinking out loud can be useful," she said. "It forces you to clarify your thoughts into words, and creates some distance that makes it easier to spot flaws in your thinking."  
"Same here," Will replied. "Am I being less unbearable now?"  
"Yes," Truewell said with a cold smile.

Beep.

"That's funny," Will said. "Positive for DMSO and Mayor-type decayed nanotech. So much for that theory."  
"Didn't trigger, either?" Truewell said. "So, if the DMSO is a red herring..."  
"I don't think it is. But this doesn't add up. So the reaction doesn't take place in air or water, it needs something in blood and...that's it!"  
"You've lost me."  
"Don't you see?" Will exclaimed, pointing at the lab in an accusatory motion worthy of Joe McCarthy. "The water sample was right next to where people died, so it must have been viable when it got there. It's changing, Truewell! It doesn't just need blood, or DMSO, or to be fresh, it needs all three!" He spun around to face her, right hand balled into a fist. "It only stays active for...minutes, at best! You blanket the target with the agent, and everything that doesn't get into people's bloodstreams decays after a short time. If the people who are exposed then receive DMSO, the agent reacts and exposes its payload. So we're dealing with...three forms, total. The original, the pre-triggered, and the decayed version. DMSO plus number two means you're dead, otherwise nothing happens. And the pre-trigger has to be something in the blood -"  
"So if this can only happen in the first few minutes before the agent decays - then Paradise is safe now."  
"Not perfectly," Will said. "The agent might stay viable in certain solutions - it has to be transported somehow without degenerating, if it's not a binary weapon on top of that - that would complicate things, you know?" Truewell nodded absent-mindedly. "What scares me most is how long the agent could stay viable in human blood. If it reacts with something in there to gain its pre-triggered form, then god knows how stable **that** compound might be...you could be exposed to this and only later come into contact with DMSO, and it would send you into severe organophosphate poisoning on the spot. By the time we breathed Paradise air, the agent had already decayed to its harmless form - the same thing with Mayor Peters. He was there until the ambulance came, so he must have stayed alive long enough to breathe both the original agent and its decayed form." Will took a deep breath. "This is it, Truewell! That's how it has to work! I need to do more tests in a proper lab, as quickly as possible..."  
"Hold your horses for a moment, Dr. Anthros. Just one tiny thing I need to know. Does all of that mean we're sure now that it needs airborne DMSO to be used as a weapon of mass destruction?"  
"On a short timeframe...yes."  
"Thank you," Truewell said.

---

Jaime's bad luck with rooftops continued; while there was no gun-wielding Sara Corvus to consider, the harsh wind squeezed tears into her natural eye. The bionic one, of course, took the onslaught without so much as a blink. Her hair whipped against her face, and even her heavy jacket couldn't help but billow in the strong breeze. Jaime found shelter behind one of the ceiling-mounted air conditioning units and looked at the all too close skyline stretching just ahead of her.

She heard the helicopter before she saw it, coming in from the North. It took her eyes a second to work out the exact contours. It was a sleek machine, long and narrow, with a pronounced nose and clean lines. There was no interior lighting visible from outside the machine, and together with its medium gray paint, that made it all the more difficult to work out where the night sky ended and the helicopter began.

_Sikorsky S-76D,_ the voice helpfully offered. After a moment's hesitation, it continued._ Maximum take-off weight 11,700 pounds, maximum speed For a second there I thought you had learned to cut that out._

_Your chariot, Madame,_ Nathan said with a surprisingly uncomical French accent.

The closer the helicopter got, the slower it went; the downwash of the main rotor over the building roof tossed some loose dust at her, and Jaime had a hard time deciding between using her arms to shield her face or her ears. Finally, it was right above her, hovering a few meters over the roof; the cabin door opened, and Jaime bent her knees.

Chalk it up to fortuitous limitations of her raw power, her gaze being locked onto the lower edge of the cabin door or even the system knowing that hitting the main rotor of a medium-size helicopter would have dire consequences (in this case, mostly for the helicopter) - but Jaime's jump took her just high enough to grab onto the edge. The triumph was dulled when the helicopter swayed slightly from the sudden weight increase - enough that her left hand slipped off. For a moment, Jaime's momentum spun her around, and she thought that if she'd have to let go, over the roof would be better than over the street. But her right hand held fast, clamped onto the aircraft's fuselage, and when Jaime found the strength to turn around and try to pull herself up, she found the hand of a black-clad Berkut soldier waiting for hers. Between his efforts and her bionic arm, she was yanked into the helo with a single pull, sprawling her onto the sparse floor between the two rows of seats in the cabin. The door closed behind her, and she felt the machine sway forward to continue its flight. The lights inside the cabin flicked back on.

Wordlessly, the soldier helped her regain her feet and shuffled her into an empty seat. She had enough of her wits about her to strap into the seatbelts and put on the large set of earmuffs dangling from the headrest. The cabin was an upscale one, with upholstered seating and smooth contours over the nastier edges of the structural cage.

"Are you alright?" the soldier spoke, and it reverbed in her headset quite clearly; the microphone arm of her own set sat just above her eyes, and she swiveled it into position with a single twisting motion. "Are you alright?" he repeated.  
"I'm fine," Jaime replied.  
"Glad to hear it," he said. "You're really taking us for a guided tour of the city's rooftops, aren't you?"  
"Rooftops, plural?" She looked around. The voice dutifully recounted names, straining to keep up with her gaze, but none of the faces seemed familiar.  
"We extracted you yesterday," the soldier said. Jaime briefly retracted her memories of the day before. Logically, she would have to have flown back in the helicopter after the fight with Corvus, but her memory of that period up until finding herself back in the lab was colored by a certain...non-existence. The film reel went straight from guys in balaclavas to guys in surgical masks. Jaime focused her look long enough on the soldier to listen to the voice in her head. _Antoine Ginsburg_ it said. Jaime ignored the rest.  
"Ah," she said, trying to force her face to come up with one of those smile things that seemed to be getting harder by the minute.  
"I was the good-looking one," he joked.

"So," Jaime said, letting her gaze wander once more, but slower this time. "What exactly are we going to do?" First up was bald man next to Ginsburg's slender frame, with the kind of maybe-tan, maybe-swarthy skin tone and facial features that made it difficult to tell where, exactly, he was from. _Maik Jordan, ex-Navy EOD,_ the voice commented._ I bet he gets a lot of crap over that name_, Jaime thought. Beside him sat a sullen-looking filipino man with just a streak of purple in his dark hair. _Adolpho Sagabaen, ex-Army, Airborne_. Finally, there was the sole soldier sitting on her side of the cabin - _Thomas Calavera, ex-Army Hey I recognize that guy._

"Assault," Ginsburg said. "150 Pennsylvania, Central Waterfront. We touch down about a quarter mile away, suit up and cover the rest of the distance on foot. We form up outside and breach. The faster we can take them, the better our chances are."  
"Uh, sure," Jaime replied, not sure at all. "- so, er -"  
"Yes?"  
"I can't believe I'm saying this, but why don't we fly there directly, and then we - uh, we fastrope? Is that it? - we fastrope down and hit them before they have time to set up? I mean, that's what we do in Iraq, right?" After a moment, she added "The faster we can take them, the better our chances are."  
"**Can** you fastrope?" Ginsburg asked with a smile.  
"No," Jaime admitted. "I mean, my ex-Boss loves to climb and he wouldn't shut up about it - I could figure out a karabiner."  
"You're thinking of rappelling," Ginsburg said. "I'm not letting you do either without a cert from Mr. Kim."  
"- or I could just jump out of the chopper." Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Calavera wince.  
"So, no, we can't do that," Ginsburg said. "The problem is, fastrope insertion into a hot LZ means popping smoke and suppressive fire from the helo. It's fast, but it's not quiet - we're operating right next to the 280, so that would definitely wake up the neighbors. And even if this was Basra, this isn't a Blackhawk: No rope mounts, all our gear is locked in the rear cargo hold, and no mounted machineguns."  
"Ah, alright," Jaime said, nodding. "I guess that makes sense. Do you guys do this a lot?"  
"Used to," Sagabaen threw in. Jaime gave him another look. "Go somewhere, break down doors, kill people," he continued. "Yeah, a lot of that."

It took Jaime a second to find a response to that.

"I'm sorry," she said.  
"For what?" he asked, sounding nonplussed.  
"Okay, back to the plan," Ginsburg offered. "We're traveling light, so every bullet has to count. Sage, Jordan, you take the Gs. Cal, you're on point with the Benelli. What's in the treat box?"  
"Mark 14," Calavera said.  
"That's mine, then," Ginsburg said. "Are you armed, Sommers?"  
"Just the pistol," Jaime replied. "But that's plenty."  
"Then you take glass and spot for me. After we go in, you're three steps behind me like your life depends on it, got that?"  
"Yeah. I got that."  
"'cause it does," Ginsburg emphasized. "But don't obsess too much over it, nothing gets fucked without killing the point first."  
"Gee, thanks," Calavera said.  
"Just saying I care," Ginsburg said and grinned.

* * *

**Tech Commentary:** Chemical Weapons

So, if your only exposure (ha!) to chemical weapons was watching The Rock, you'll have heard about VX being an extremely dangerous agent. Unfortunately, while little green balls of death make for a compelling action movie, it's not a very accurate portrayal of real VX. So, let's start with some of the technical stuff. (I'll try not to upset your stomach too much.)

First of all, VX is a nerve agent. Among chemical weapons, this a fairly prolific group, including the G and V series of agents. Other types of chemical weapons include blood agents, blister agents and pulmonary agents. Each of those groups has a different mode of attack. Blood agents attack on a cellular level and prevent oxygen from reaching the body's cells, leading to a painful death by asphyxiation. The infamous Zyklon-B is a blood agent, as is cyanide. Blister agents attack skin and mucous membranes, leading to severe chemical burns and respiratory damage - mustard gas, as used in the First World War, is the best-known example. Pulmonary agents cause fluid build-up in the lungs of victims and attack the eyes - chlorine and phosgene gas are notable pulmonary agents. Finally, nerve agents - among them VX - attack the body's ability to relax its muscles, rapidly leading to loss of muscle control, breathing distress and violent spasms. As with other agent types, a likely cause of death is suffocation.

VX can be recognized as an oily fluid in its liquid form. It can also be aerosolized as droplets, but due to its low volatility, pools of the liquid do not evaporate readily. This makes VX a sessile weapon that can persist for days or even weeks in an environment, requiring substantial decontamination procedures. VX is further described as taste- and odorless. It is estimated as having a median lethal dose (that is, a concentration high enough to kill half of an experiment's subjects) of about 10 milligrams via skin contact and about 30 to 50 milligram-minutes per cubic meter. That means breathing air with a concentration of, say, 40 milligrams per cubic meter of air builds up a lethal dose within one minute, 20 milligrams in two minutes, 80 milligrams in half a minute and so on. For comparison, a single drop of water weighs about 25 milligrams. It's easy to see how even a single droplets of VX coming into contact with your skin can be very dangerous, indeed. The only consolation I can offer is that, in general, skin-based VX poisoning takes longer before it starts affecting your body; you may have have as many as ten minutes before serious symptoms start manifesting.

So, how does a nerve agent work? Essentially, muscles have receptors for acetylcholine: an important neurotransmitter chemical that activates muscles and causes them to contract. The muscle stays contracted as long as the receptors are activated by acetylcholine. To relax the muscle again, the body uses an enzyme called acetylcholineesterase (AChE), which breaks down the neurotransmitter and "resets" the receptors on the muscle. Nerve agents take out this enzyme. With no working AChE, the muscle can't be returned to its relaxed state. Nerve agents are just a subgroup of different chemicals that are called AChE inhibitors, all of whom can take out AChE, but nerve agents differ from other chemicals in that they are hard to reverse and can take out a lot of AChE in low doses.

The standard treatment for organophosphate poisoning (this includes not only nerve agents specifically, but also organophosphate-based insecticides) is atropine, in itself a dangerous compound that nevertheless is extremely important in several medical applications. Atropine does not reactivate AChE or bind loose organophosphates; instead, it displaces acetylcholine at the receptor level, relaxing muscles and thereby inducing the opposite effect of the nerve agent. The chief difficulty in applying atropine is the short window between exposure to nerve agent and the victim's death (sometimes only a minute, for breathing air with a high concentration of the agent). Also, there are the dangers of an atropine overdose, which - among other things - can lead to rapid heartbeat and ventricular fibrillation. This then requires the application of a defibrillator and restarting the heart - a dicey proposition under the best of circumstances. Additionally, pralidoxime can be given, which does reactivate inhibited AChE. Unlike atropine, pralidoxime is considered a mostly safe drug with no serious side effects, but by itself does not act fast enough to save victims of acute organophosphate poisoning, so the two are usually combined. Further, some militaries have experimented with giving soldiers doses of reversible AChE inhibitors prior to exposure - those afford some protection from nerve agent exposure, though it appears to be more in the "takes longer to kill you" than "makes you shrug off low doses" vein of protection.

To simplify the application of those two important drugs under adverse conditions, many militaries issue an autoinjector, which does not require particular precision or expertise to use. The helper merely holds the autoinjector against the victim's thigh muscle and presses the button, which sends a spring-loaded needle into the victim and injects doses of atropine or pralidoxime. The US military issued the Mark 1 NAAK, which is still widespread and uses separate needles for the two drugs; the newer ATNAA has both drugs in one device, simplifying the process and reducing the potential for user error. They teach that used autoinjectors should have their needle bent and attached to the breast pocket of the victim's clothes to tell medical professionals at a glance how many the victim has received, that the helper should wait for fifteen minutes after the first autoinjector before adding a second dose, and that no more than three autoinjectors should be used in total. Because nerve agents are also absorbed through the skin, it is not only important to remove the victim from airborne concentrations of agents, but also to remove his clothes and use surface decontamination to remove any traces of the agent.

The truly horrifying aspect to chemical weapons is that various militaries have used them all the way throughout the 20th century, and although current reported stockpiles are shrinking as agents are destroyed, the efforts to control and destroy chemical weapons often play second fiddle to stopping nuclear proliferation. (Not that stopping the spread of nuclear warheads isn't important, but they command a lot of public attention out of proportion to their dangers. Just ask the people fighting to ban landmines and cluster munitions.) Unlike biological weapons, which were never controllable and predictable enough to see widespread use in modern combat, chemical weapons are an all too real threat, their manufacture and use honed to a fine art.

If you have never worn a gas mask, I recommend you seek out the experience - if only to access a little bit of what it feels like when the air you're breathing could be trying to kill you.


	11. Chapter 11

Hey guys, welcome to Chapter 11. (Not affiliated with Finger 11.) For future reference, this is the absolutely nastiest I'm willing to let the descriptions go to, but given the subject matter, there really wasn't a way around it. I don't think it's excessively lurid, though. Also, a meditation on the psychology of combat, which is, like, **totes** relevant to the ongoing plot.

I think I can wrap this up by Chapter 13, though I have been known to be off on my estimates. I don't know about you, but after almost a year of working on this, I'd like to be done with it and get to the next story. After all, there's grandiose plans and character arcs to execute once I get clear of Jaime's first freaking day on the job. Also, pretend I inserted the standard review beg here.

On with it!

---

Even through the ear muffs, Jaime heard the helicopter. It was a disconcerting sound melange, a steady whine from the twin turboshaft engines, the main rotor digging through the night sky and the instrument noises from the cockpit.

"Final approach," someone said through the earmuffs; Jaime suspected the pilot. "Interior going dark in three."  
_One, two, three_, Jaime counted out for herself. The lights in the cabin went out, and her bionic eye switched to its night-vision mode. More sounds - hydraulics actuating panels, pushing the landing gear out and locking it in the downward position. The feeling of the whole machine tilting backward, a different pitch from the main rotor above. And finally, the thump of the helicopter touching solid ground and sinking a little into the shocks of its landing gear.

"Everybody ready?" Ginsburg asked.  
"Check."  
"Check."  
"Check."  
"...check," Jaime said. The noise of the twin turbines settled down quickly.  
"Clear for egress," the pilot said.

The cabin door slid open; Calavera was the first out, being closest to the exit. Jaime watched him climb out and dart clear off the helicopter's danger zone, crouching well clear of the drooping rotor blades. Jordan was the next to jump and skedaddle; a tap on the shoulder from Ginsburg reminded Jaime to take off the earmuffs and unhook her seat harness. Sagabaen went next, and Jaime instinctively took the place at the exit. When he was clear, she ran, one hand on her head as if to push it down. By the time Ginsburg climbed out, the rotors had spun down enough for him to get to the rear of the helicopter, underneath the tail boom, and unlock the rear cargo hatch. The other soldiers walked back toward him. Jaime followed and wondered what the deal was.

Between Sagabaen and Jordan, three large hardshell cases were removed from the helicopter's rear. Some morbid streak in Jaime pegged them as just the right size to bury a twelve-year old in. Ginsburg unlocked them, swinging out the top and the front on hinges with several trays following their motion, like an absurdly oversized toolbox. The variety of military-grade equipment inside gave Jaime a slight headache, but after a moment their names were in her head. G36C carbines - she'd seen those before in the hands of Berkut soldiers. A Benelli M4 shotgun, the precise details of which Jaime was spared, MBAV tactical vests, AN/PRC-148 sets with laryngophone attachments, and -

"Sommers!" Ginsburg said; she whipped around to see him crouching next to one of the cases, handling several SIG P226 pistols and a worryingly large pile of things supposed to go with them. "Am I correct in assuming that you're not hiding a vest or a holster under that leather jacket?"

Wordlessly, Jaime dropped her Berkut bag, took off her jacket and grabbed one of the vests from Jordan; it was heavier than it looked, but she managed to slip it over her head. Her hands reached for the hidden adjustment straps all by themselves and pulled them taut in a single smooth movement. Ginsburg tossed her a smaller piece of gear. It was an L-shaped shell of stiff fabric with a long strap on one end and smaller fasteners on the other. The fasteners easily hooked into the lower "belt" of the tactical vest; the strap found its way around her right thigh.

"That's a drop holster," Ginsburg explained. The importance of this precise naming, if there was any, escaped Jaime. She simply nodded and transferred her own pistol into the holster, gaining a satisfying click sound from the retention mechanism. The headache was getting worse.

_I'll sync you to the team's radios in a moment,_ Nathan said. _You're spiking a little. Do you feel okay?_  
"Everything is under control," Jaime repeated.  
"Hmm?" Ginsburg said.  
Jaime's eyes focused on him, and after a moment as comfortable as a shower of boiling lead, she answered. "Office on the other line."  
"Does that...hurt?" he asked with a distinct lack of confidence in his train of thought.  
"No," Jaime said. "Doesn't hurt."

Ginsburg blinked silently. Then, just to prove that he could, he did it again.

"...comms on two-zero-six-niner," he announced loudly, "set for AES, second key."  
_Got it_, Nathan said after a second. _Come on, try it._  
"Can you hear me?" Jaime whispered; the looks of the rest of the team confirmed that yes, they could hear her. Ginsburg gave her a belayed thumbs-up and then his eyes darted from her to the rest of the team. Jaime's headache receded slightly. There were now green, translucent diamond shapes hovering in her vision on top of the Berkut soldiers. At least it was a fairly subtle effect, not the sensory assault of the full augmented reality demonstration Nathan had given her earlier that day.

They gave her additional ammunition for the pistol. They offered her a rifle, which she turned down quickly. Then there were nods. They ran off, heading for the target, and Jaime followed. Her thoughts were elsewhere.

_Becca._

---

In the hour since Jaime had left, Becca had made more of a dent in the sofa than in her investigation. In her defense, the couch's springs had long since lost all semblance of tension, turning the dominating piece of furniture in Jaime's living room into a poor man's beanbag. (Though at least it didn't smell like stale beer.) But the couch wasn't the problem - the lack of any evidence to sustain her suspicions was. No matter how hard Becca stared at the search engine results plastered over her netbook's screen, it was clear that she was looking for something that just wasn't there to find.

"Rebecca has to know," she said, though there was nobody around to hear it.

The voice of reason was grinding down her resolve to keep looking; even the strong hunch that she had seen part of the Bledsoe interview somewhere else was turning out to be one of those times where hunches were just wrong, a misfiring neuron here, a twisted association there. Pattern recognition running amok. Becca was fairly sure that this was the recipe for a conspiracy theory - take one obsessive weirdo, add disparate morsels of information and let simmer over a low heat.

_Get it through your head. It's not there._

Becca yawned, and together with her headache, that was a strong enough argument for sleep. Becca closed the search result tabs in her browser, calling off the electronic bloodhounds one by one. The cursor hovered over the last tab's "close" button, waiting for her command. She tapped the touchpad, the tab closed, and just like that her evening disappeared in a puff of smoke.

"Bang," she said.

She tapped the netbook's power switch and put it down on the couch, where it duly sank a little into the upholstery. Her eyes hurt, and blinking didn't help much. God, only fifteen minutes from Midnight. This was officially way too damn late. She shambled into the apartment's bathroom and flicked on the lights. The room wasn't all that big, with a little bathtub that was just big enough for her to lie in (but wouldn't fit Jaime unless she pulled her legs in), with a shower curtain pulled to the side. There was the toilet, and right next to it the sink, with a bathroom cabinet hovering over it. Becca opened the mirrored door, pulled out a plastic cup and filled it with lukewarm water. She brushed her teeth as quickly as she could manage, swished a gulp of water and spat it back into the sink. After rinsing off her toothbrush under the faucet and putting it back into the cabinet, she grabbed a bottle of ibuprofen pills, swallowed one and chased it with the rest of the cup's water. The cabinet door closed with a slight creak, bringing Becca face to face with her reflection.

**Definitely** way too damn late.

Becca dumped her now well and truly lived in day clothes into the laundry basket and made her way back to her room. She had just enough energy left to put on her pajamas, climb into bed and draw the blanket over her head. Sleep was painfully slow in coming.

_Jesus, Rebecca, let this one go. Be happy for her_, she thought as forcefully as she could. _Just be happy for her._

---

_Sommers? Sommers? Earth to Supergirl, are you receiving? Sommersby? Summertime?_

It took Nathan's formidable skill at prodding and annoying Jaime to bring her attention back to the present moment. The problem with those little blackouts was that Jaime couldn't be sure what caused them: was it another maladjustment in the system? Residual effects from the car crash? Jaime squeezed her eyes closed. Her breath was steady, her footsteps in perfect sync. Everything was working just fine, except for, well, Jaime.

"I'm here," Jaime said, opening her eyes again. They were about halfway to the target, Ginsburg in front of her and the three other soldiers moving on the opposite side of the road. The five of them looked spectacularly out of place. In a way, that made the total absence of any witnesses on the streets at this time beneficial, but it also made their bounding overwatch approach seem like overkill on the wrong side of hilarious.  
_I've come up with something,_ Nathan said. _Check it: what if Finlayson wasn't the only one with a suicide implant? You might run into more people with one._  
"So, what - you figured out how to -"  
_I think I know how to trigger them. We have the transmission recorded and the right frequency, so all we need to do is push a button. Classic replay attack._  
"Ambrose...that's the most idiotic thing you've said to me so far."  
_Really, Sommers? What was that for? You want to tell me that you have a better idea, then? So, what the hell do you know about remote-controlled hardware? Do you have a degree in computer engineering? Do you have DVD Jon on your speed dial? No? Then show some damn gratitude I got you this far - it's better than nothing, is what I'm saying. I mean, sure, it could be ineffective if they rotate frequencies or use individually coded transmissions -_  
"You think this is about the technical details? Seriously?" Jaime asked. "I've got exactly one problem, and it's that the whole concept of a remote death switch is about the most horrible thing I can imagine! You seemed to agree not twenty minutes ago, so I'm having a hard time figuring out why you're suddenly cheerleading for it."  
_Yes, but -_  
"Oh, I guess it's okay when **we** get to push a button and make the baddies die. After all, it's just like a video game, right? Do we get extra points for catching them with their pants down?"  
_Woah woah woah, Sommers, back up. Let's make this clear, I am not in any way condoning doing this as a first strike.  
_"And if we warn them first? 'Oh, fyi, we're going to detonate your aortas in five seconds!' Is that okay, then?"  
_No, it's not okay, I know, but - _Nathan said, audibly taking a few deep breaths._ Look. If you get there and they start shooting at you, you need to take them out somehow - fists, guns or this, in descending order of risk to you. It's self-defense! No matter how - you'll have to kill them. And by, uh, by you I mean you guys, you and the team, not you specifically because I know you're not twigging to the idea of taking lives for Uncle Sam and apple pie and that's cool with me, I respect technical pacifists! I mean, yes, you're totally right on your point, we need to hunt down the assholes who built those things and make sure nobody else ever uses them again, but at the moment I'm trying to tilt the situation back in our favor every goddamn way I can! I'm trying to keep you and our tactical team and any potential innocent bystanders as safe as humanly possible here, okay? And if we can do this without risking any stray bullets..._  
"Forget stray bullets - what about stray radio waves, Mr. Genius? What if there are innocents with that implant? This is a fucking death lottery. At least you can aim a gun, but you can't aim a signal."  
_Well, yes. Hm. Yes, that's a point, though __**technically**__ -_  
"Save it," Jaime snarled. "I didn't let myself be talked into this just to find out we're no better than the other guys. If you want to help me, find a way to neutralize those damn things."  
_Yes, Mistress,_ Nathan replied dejectedly. _Doing thy bidding, Mistress. Sticking to moral high ground, Mistress._  
"Ambrose..."  
_Shutting up now. Mistress._

It was all Jaime could do to keep from groaning.

"We're there," Sagabaen said, right into Jaime's head from across the street. Coming in via the tactical radio, his voice was deformed in a way subtly different from Nathan coming through the phone, but she wasn't in the right frame of mind to appreciate it. As a special bonus, her bionic ear picked up his original spoken words, too, shifted just milliseconds behind the radio transmission. The effect was like the world's smallest echo.  
"Go to NVGs," Ginsburg said. Standing right next to Jaime, the sound of his voice more closely matched the radio transmission of the same. She had received no night-vision gear, for want of a compelling need: her bionic eye did a better job than the blocky goggles the rest of the team was busy strapping to their faces. _AN/PVS-7D Night Observation I really don't need to know that._

The target, as she understood it, was a small industrial building, with a loading dock, corrugated steel roofing and the visual parameters of any of a dozen similar buildings right next to it.

Jaime glanced over at Ginsburg; he had his rifle slung and his back against the wall of an empty security hut, offering her a leg up. Jaime simply tilted her head sideways and pointed at her bionic arm in response. It came to be that she boosted Ginsburg onto the shack's roof and then pulled herself up behind him, which seemed to be a small but important victory on that evening. Ginsburg crawled close to the edge of the shack's roof, then set up his rifle, the _Mark 14 Mod 0, Caliber 7.62x51mm Can you give it a rest already?_. The rifle, as configured, seemed ridiculously front-heavy to Jaime, sporting a collapsible bipod, a laser sight and a vertical foregrip in addition to an intimidatingly big scope, all of which seemed only poorly made up for by the almost skeletal shoulder stock. Ginsburg spent a few seconds fiddling with the scope, then clicked a switch on the laser sight and scooted close enough to get into a prone firing stance. Jaime took this as her cue to crawl up on his left side and take out a pair of binoculars from her carrying vest.

"Lead in position," Ginsburg radioed. "Clear line from here, everybody have eyes on target?"  
"Check," Sagabaen replied. Calavera, Jordan and finally Jaime concurred.  
"Setting up," Ginsburg said, and his rifle swayed as he tested his potential field of fire. "Everybody see my sign?"  
It took Jaime until her turn to say "Check" to see the small dot dancing over the walls of the target building - no doubt from the rifle's laser.  
"Designating Red" - the laser danced over the large sliding door of the loading dock, "Black" - a personnel door on the other side of the dock - "and Gold." That one was a little further away, probably the main entrance. "Windows negative." That part was easy - Jaime couldn't make out any obvious windows from this side, either. "Sage, you're clear to Black. Bound on my mark...now!"

Jaime watched Sagabaen run from his hiding place to the building's entrance, at a speed that both seemed greater than she'd expected from his large frame and tragicomically slow from a distance. The soundtrack of passing cars from the nearby highway added its own absurd note to the performance. Doing all those maneuvers without being shot at - it seemed to Jaime like performing a grand ballet without an audience.

"Cal, clear to Black. Bound on my mark...now!"

Another running soldier. The green diamond shape that identified him as a friendly unit to Jaime's bionic vision covered most of his torso. Ginsburg's orders were unrelenting in Jaime's ears.

"Jordan, clear to Black. Sage, when Jordan reaches Black, proceed to Gold. Bound on my mark...now!"

After a few more seconds, it seemed like everybody was finally in position; Jaime alternated between free looks and watching for details through the binoculars. Both Jordan and Sagabaen had attached small packs of what Jaime assumed to be explosives to their respective doorlocks; Calavera simply held his shotgun at the ready.

"Lead ready," Ginsburg said.  
"Point ready," Calavera said.  
"Breach ready," Jordan said.  
"Breach ready," Sagabaen said.  
"Spotter ready," Jaime added. It seemed like the thing to do.  
"All elements ready," Ginsburg confirmed. "Breaching on my mark - 3, 2, 1 -"

Jaime held her breath.

"NOW!"

Two small explosions, barely muffled by the distance, pinged Jaime's ear. The door's had flown open to the tune of a small flash of light followed by a few lungfuls of smoke; within seconds, the Berkut soldiers disappeared into the building. For a handful of seconds, there was silence, only the giddy anticipation that twisted Jaime's stomach into a knot of semi-Gordian intricacy. In a way, the start of the gunshots was almost a relief. Automatic fire echoed dimly out of the building, failing to accurately convey the biblically awesome might of fill-power muzzle blasts in confined spaces. When the shooting lulled, the radio calls became even terser, if that was possible.

"Two tangos down," Calavera said. "Room clear."  
"Three tangos down," Sagabaen said, sounding short of breath. "I'm hit."  
"Fuck," Ginsburg whispered, all too audible over the radio. "Cal, Jordan, hold." In the same breath, he added "Sommers, clear to Gold."  
"- what?" Jaime protested.  
"Bound on my mark...now!"

It wasn't precisely at "Now!", but when Jaime's heartbeat surpassed 140 bpm, she found the strength to let go of the binoculars, spring up and jump down from the roof, easily hitting the ground running. The three seconds of open ground felt like forever, even if the building's wall closed in way too quickly for her taste. With a final jump, she cleared the steps leading up to the entrance, glued her back to the wall next to the doorframe and wrenched her pistol free from the holster.

---

_Everything is under control. You are standing under a willow. It is summer. A soft breeze is moving the branches above you._

Jaime's in the building, a simple office right behind the door. A desk, a punchclock, a wall-mounted shelf for time cards, a busted coffee pot, coat hooks. A hallway, Sagabaen on the floor bleeding from his leg. Someone at the other end, leaning out with a pistol _Beretta M9, Caliber 9x19mm Parabellum, 4.9 inches of barrel, 15 round magazine_. Jaime's own pistol rises by itself, firmly gripped in her bionic hand. Her left hand sits high on the grip, index finger butting up against the trigger guard. Keep your thumb clear. The dot unflinchingly wanders across her vision all the way to the unknown man's head. She feels the pressure of the trigger against her right index finger, coming up on 12 pounds, just a little more and it will break cleanly. Pull smoothly, follow through. Let the shot surprise you.

_The smooth taste of chocolate ice cream lingers on your tongue._ _Everything is under control._

---

**No**

---

At the last moment, Jaime forced the gun out of alignment. The shot broke, sending a bullet down the hallway just past the attacker's head. He drew back, out of sight, behind cover. Jaime stood out in the open, gun still aimed downrange, shock slowly conquering her face. Her chest heaved from exertion, shallow quick breaths, trying to snare oxygen. That was - not just like on the range, the dryfire exercises. It was loud, so incredibly loud, that it still rang in Jaime's natural ear. The push of the gun recoiling, the small din of the cartridge case hitting the ground swallowed by the dragon's roar of the muzzle blast.

_I almost killed him, _Jaime wanted to scream through clenched teeth._ I almost killed him!_

"What are you doing?" Sagabaen shouted in the distance. "Keep shooting!"

Jaime hesitated, but when she saw movement on the other end, she fired again, and again. It was easier. The dot hovered firmly against a wall, nowhere near anything human. Nobody to hurt. This was just to scare them away. A voice was in her head again - she'd lost the ability to tell if it was Ginsburg, Nathan or even the system, but she was being told to drag Sagabaen behind cover. Jaime obeyed, too busy keeping the gun aimed at the wall and her lungs in one piece to not act automatically on that polite suggestion. She pumped more shots down the hallway, suppressive fire, each impact stenciling a neat hole through the wall at the end. Her left hand slipped off the pistol's grip naturally, reaching for the collar of Sagabaen's vest while she crouched over him. _My God, what am I doing?_ He was heavy and the law of friction opposed her efforts, but there was no alternative. She was trapped. Fire. Fire. Her left hand had a death grip on his vest, strong enough to hurt if the system hadn't filtered that. With a mighty effort, she dragged him back into the office. Fire, fire, fire - Jaime didn't keep count, pulling the trigger until there were only clicks instead of bangs. Her brain wouldn't tell her how to do anything else.

Sagabaen brought up his own rifle, burst-firing the remains of his magazine to keep the suppressive fire up. It wasn't much, a handful of bullets, but the sound - the pressure - from an automatic carbine in a confined space like that crashed against Jaime's head like a jackhammer. She winced, closed her eyes, hearing only the clicking of her own gun. She was still pulling the trigger, over and over. With a final effort, they were behind cover, insofar as the interior walls of the building might be expected to stop a few rounds. Jaime forced her eyes open and her mouth closed. The world around her moved like it had been drowned in molasses. Her nostrils flared, her body still trying to suck in all the air it could get.

_To reload your weapon, _the voice helpfully chirped,_ press the magazine release and remove the empty magazine. Your actions are helping to save lives. Everything is under control._

_---_

**No I don't**

---

In a single smooth move, she dropped the magazine free of the weapon, letting it fall to the ground, and pulled the magazine from the left pocket of her pants. Buttplate of the magazine against the palm of her left hand, she shoved it into the pistol's magazine well. It didn't click into place. Jaime pulled it free, realizing that it rattled freely in the pistol's grip. It took a second of looking at it to determine that it was, in fact, not the right magazine for the P226. Behind her, she heard the meaty sound of a magazine successfully snapping into place, followed by the bolt of Sagabaen's carbine springing forward to chamber a round. Jaime looked at the useless magazine again, then simply dropped it and reached for another one from her vest. Her left hand dragged the magazine out of its pouch but dropped it on the floor. It went skittering, out in the open. Jaime backed away from it, further behind cover, pressed herself into the corner and finally lost control over her mouth, gasping loudly. She wasn't breathing any longer; that had made way for hyperventilation, a rapid mechanical sequence of compressing and expanding her chest. Her head was swimming.

Shots. Not from Sagabaen, but from the attackers. Their turn for suppressive fire. Jaime saw the exit door throw wood splinters from the bullet impacts.

_What happens if they shoot me?_

Sagabaen's carbine knocked her for a loop again, the sound banging against her head. Metal against metal, a precise detonation, the supersonic shockwave of the bullet exiting the gun. The noise reverberated in Jaime's bones. She drew her arms up against her face.

_Everything is under control, _it told her._ Backup is on the way _- Jaime saw the green diamonds of Jordan and Calavera through her closed eyelids, slowly creeping closer -_ and you will be fine._

---

**No no this is all wrong this is all**

_---_

_Jaime, _the voice asked,_ what's there to be afraid of? Everything is under control._

More shots - another carbine, like Sagabaen's, but farther away. A single shotgun blast. Then, silence. Only the ringing in her ears remained.

Jaime slowly opened her eyes and rose from her crouch. Her hand was clamped around the pistol as if she wanted to be buried with it. The slide was still locked back, the magazine well empty. As if by reflex, she opened her hand, as fast as she could, letting the gun drop to the ground. She looked around the room. She saw Calavera rush in, blood that wasn't his own splattered over his face. He told her to help him with Sage, and so she followed him numbly, knelt down next to the wounded soldier and followed orders. She might have said that Sagabaen's leg wound bled like a stuck pig, if she had ever seen one slaughtered; as it was, Calavera smirked.

"Looks worse than it is," he said. "Lie back and keep your leg up. Sommers, I need you to put some pressure on that. I'll be right back with the kit."  
"Ice cream," Jaime said, putting both hands above the wound. "I could go for some ice cream right now."  
"You buying?" Sagabaen asked, still sounding detached. "That was okay."  
"What was okay?" Jaime asked with a forced smile.  
"You," Sagabaen said. "Okay for your first knife fight."  
"That's _- wind moves the branches -_ "that's slang, huh?"  
"Something like that. You get hit?"  
"No, I'm - I'm fine, I didn't get hit," Jaime said. "But I don't know whether to giggle or throw up."  
"It can be like that. It'll pass."

Within a minute, Calavera was back, spreading a first aid kit onto the floor. His first stop was a pair of latex gloves, then a pair of scissors. The leg of Sagabaen's uniform yielded easily, exposing the whole bloody mess. Jaime's internal barometer took a wild swing towards the "throw up" side of the equation, but she kept it together. Calavera grabbed a large shiny foil packet and easily tore it open at the top. Carefully, he lined up the packet with the wound and poured the contents onto it - a white powder that disappeared into the crevice of blood and torn meat, leaving a light sprinkling of pale flakes on Sagabaen's skin. Jaime noticed Sagabaen's breath picking up, from what she could only imagine to be the pain catching up with him; she looked away just long enough for Calavera to press a sponge-like wound dressing on top. A second, smaller package - still sealed - found its way on top of that, in turn, and then he broke out the wrap and fixed the entire affair to Sagabaen's leg, as tightly as he could.

"How's Sage?" Ginsburg asked; Jaime's head snapped around to see him kneeling almost right next to her. She hadn't paid attention to the situation. That was bad, they would go on to tell her. In those types of situation, she would be told, keeping your awareness going was paramount. Jaime's only concern was that Sagabaen didn't bleed out under her.  
"He needs MedEvac," Calavera said, "but other than that he's still a lucky bastard."  
"Funny," Sagabaen replied flatly, "didn't see you get shot."  
"Well, there's lucky," Calavera quipped, "and then there's good."  
"Are we done now?" Jaime asked.  
"Well, are we?" Ginsburg shot back. "Jordan, how are we doing?"  
"I found what the old man's looking for," Jordan radioed back, "and, uh, yeah. It's pretty big. I need Sommers for this."

---

Jaime followed Ginsburg deeper into the building. The man who'd shot at her - the man she had almost killed with her first shot - was sprawled onto his back. He was wearing nothing fancier than dress slacks and a blue shirt, the latter of which had been torn to shreds by the cloud of steel shot that had made his chest their new home. The pool of blood underneath him was large enough to require stepping over, and there seemed to a fine cloud of crimson on the closest wall, too, sprayed out by the force of the impact. There was only one concession to good taste: he'd been considerate enough to fall in a way that concealed the exit wounds on his back.

Ginsburg acknowledged her stare and tapped her on the shoulder. "Come on," he said, "nothing to see here."  
_He can no longer harm you,_ the voice whispered. Jaime's late-night hot dogs moved another notch upward.  
"I'm gonna need new pants," she finally said, pointedly looking away from the body.

The bottoms of her jeans had caught splatters, while her shoes had gotten a full dose of the puddle. The knees and the calves were similarly bloody from her kneeling next to Sagabaen. The blood on her hands was still slick, leaving more stains in the places Jaime touched without thinking. Two years ago, those jeans had been a treat, a little something Jaime just did for herself when she saw them on sale. Now they were only fit for the inevitable biohazard trash bag.

"I think you can expense those," Ginsburg said, trying to lighten the mood.

In response, Jaime lightened her stomach. The floor really didn't deserve it; neither did the unlucky guys who would be called for crime scene cleanup after the fact. Ginsburg stood to the side, still wondering just what the hell he could do to help Jaime through this part.

"I'm -" Jaime hacked out, "I'm good. I just...ugh. I couldn't -"  
"Would you...do you need a moment?"  
"Oh no, just - I need this to be over, so I can get out of here and...you know, not think about this for a while. You got a tissue?"

Ginsburg did, in fact, have a tissue, and handed it over without further coercion. Jaime grabbed it without sight or thanks and wiped her mouth. Jordan's location was behind just one more door, so Jaime steeled herself and made her way over, chased by Ginsburg's concerned look.

_Everything is under control._

Jaime's breath was quick, no doubt about it. It wasn't speeding, but there was exertion behind it, drawing more oxygen into her lungs. The world was in sharp focus, the stench of industrial grease heavy all the way into her throat. Jordan was huddled next to a device that reminded Jaime of nothing so much as a whiskey distillery in miniature. There was a central, large pressure vessel surrounded by a jungle of smaller piping, and to judge from the number of fittings penetrating the building's roof, those were feeding into enough nozzles to equip a whole air wing of cropdusters. The front of it bore a control mechanism straight out of a Sharper Image catalog, all stainless steel and beveled smoke glass in front of a large display.

That display, in turn, chose this moment to tick down to 7:00. Jaime's implants insisted that this was, indeed, an accurate countdown to Midnight. Alas, Jaime had more important things to do than appreciate the accuracy of a doomsday device's timing mechanism. Jordan had already removed a lower panel, showcasing some of the mechanism's internals. Jaime went over to look, but after a few seconds had to concede that this was a bit more sophisticated than a "red wire, green wire" type of setup.

"That looks like -" she began.  
"- no explosive device I have ever seen," Jordan finished. Jaime gave him a "You're supposed to be the expert here!" look and felt her chest tighten.

_You are experiencing a minor chemical imbalance. Everything is under control._

"Ambrose," Jaime coughed, "are you seeing this?"  
_Blowing up the stills now,_ Nathan answered.  
"Word choice, Ambrose," she said, "I'm standing next to a bomb."  
_Nope! _came his reply._ I don't think so. See, the good news is, it's not a bomb, probably._  
"Probably not a bomb, huh, that's a real relief."

_Everything is under control._

"But of course now you're going to tell me the bad news, what it is instead, and it'll be worse."  
_I hate being predictable almost as much as saying that you're right, but yes, that was what I was going to get to, the bad news part, which is really 'no good at all' very bad. Uh, not to scare you, Sommers, but you're looking at a high-pressure chemical dispersal system, designed to spray a really nasty chemical weapon right into the prevailing winds over the City. And it appears to be -  
_"On a clock, yes, I can see that for myself! How do we disarm it?"  
"I've got it," Jordan threw in. "Mechanism for the pressure vessel, right? I can see some piping behind the PCBs, and this thing looks like a servo. If we can block the servo's movement, it can't open the valve."  
_Tell Sergeant Smartass that we can't be sure this is the main valve, the only main valve or even really a valve, not to mention the servo itself could be a red herring._  
"Ambrose thinks you're full of shit," Jaime slurred, a trail of saliva running down from the left corner of her mouth. Her eyes were half-closed.  
"Helpful as ever," Jordan replied. "Hey, are you okay? You look like crap."  
"I'm -"

Jaime looked at Jordan, then at the drool dripping from her chin. When she tried to raise her arm to wipe it off, nothing happened.

_Everything is under control._

"Can't control," Jaime gasped, almost falling over backward. Jordan recoiled in reflex, having brought up his arm just in time to intercept spittle, and he watched Jaime struggle back onto wobbly feet. She was holding her head, stumbling around, and the only thing that prevented Jordan from jumping up and steadying her was that the impulse came too late: she fell backwards, hit the floor and sprawled out.  
_Sommers, listen to me, this is very important..._  
"Get out of - of -" she giggled.  
_What? I'm sorry, but...oh, fuck me. Bledsoe!_ _She's crashing!_

---

_Everything is under control. You are going to the movies with your parents. Your father offers you a bag of popcorn. It smells very good._

Ginsburg puts his hand on Jaime's shoulder. Tears stream down her face. Her breathing becomes shallow and slow, and the air that passes through her throat is a mere whisper. The shivers are too much for the system to filter out. She's cold. She's hot. She's smiling.

_Sommers, you have to calm down and listen to me,_ Nathan says. _Calm down. You're the only -  
_"It's in here," Jaime says, bobbing her head to the tune of a quiet orchestra. "I love this song."  
She opens her eyes again and sees Jordan and Ginsburg crouched over her. They're shouting at her without words - first there is gibberish, then sounds, then it all slowly fades out.  
"My head is killing me," she says softly. "Doesn't hurt."

Jaime stops breathing.

_Everything is under control. Everything is under control. Everything is under control..._

* * *

**Tradecraft Commentary:** A (very brief) look at the psychology of combat

One of the most stressful situations you can find yourself in is ongoing combat. You are exhausted, performing at a painfully high level that quickly saps your strength. You are scared of being killed, or of your friends being killed, in the wink of an eye. You are being shot at and in turn shooting at other people. There's chaos, loud noises and bright flashes all competing for your attention. And to top it off, you've suddenly lost all fine dexterity and grace, your hands are shaking and you can't think straight. As Jarhead puts it: welcome to the suck.

The impact of psychological factors on a soldier's fighting ability was recognized as early as the American Civil War, where diagnoses of "Nostalgia" or "Soldier's Heart" were common enough to be notable, but at the time psychological factors were poorly understood and thought to stem from either poor training or a general, ill-defined "weakness". It took until the First World War to get to the term "Shell shock" and the first implementations of psychological triage, pulling afflicted soldiers from the trenches and allowing them to recover near the front on light duty. Today, all three of those illnesses are understood to be manifestations of what we call Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. As advances in protective and medical technology drive down casualties with physical wounds, the suffering of PTSD-afflicted soldiers gains more weight in our perception. In a way, it still seems strange that healthy young people with no prior indications of any mental sickness can return from military service as shells of their former selves with not a mark on them, their life destroyed by something that's - to put it dismissively - all in their head.

Now, those long-term consequences can be dire indeed, but what you go through in the moment when the shooting starts isn't a walk in the park, either. So, let's look at what happens in short-term stress response. Stress activates the sympathetic nervous system, with an increase in adrenaline/epinephrine. Adrenaline, essentially, boosts all bodily functions relevant to fighting or fleeing while shutting down non-essential processes. Heart rate and glucose level shoot up as the body tries to prepare the skeletal muscle groups for maximum performance. At the same time, blood vessels near the surface constrict, and both digestion and the immune system are suppressed. The latter effects are a major part of why constant stress has negative effects on health, but in a limited timeframe, the reaction can be beneficial.

In concert with another chemical, dopamine, high levels of adrenaline can actually induce a drug-like state known as "combat high". The effect has been compared to cocaine, and leads to a general feeling of disconnection and invincibility. Some also report a change in temporal perception and sensory efficiency, describing that they were capable of reading the stamping on the base of a cartridge case flying past or the world slowing down to allow them to easily line up a perfect shot. It's not quite clear whether this is entirely a function of the altered brain chemistry filling in "blanks" and coloring memories, or if sped-up processing within the brain actually grants faster reflexes and a subjectively slowed perception of time. But combat high is far from a good thing: it adds to the psychological damage by creating a reward mechanism from the stress situation, leading those who are susceptible to it to seek out high-stress situations - the stereotypical "war junkie". Turning to drugs to replicate the high is also widespread. Further, even within a combat high, the feeling of being completely in control of a situation can be very dangerous, as it destroys situational awareness and leads to risk-seeking behavior that can easily get the sufferer killed. It is not quite clear how combat high relates to more common self-induced highs such as the "rush" experienced by people engaging in some extreme sports, or the runner's high, which appears to be more of a pain management strategy after sustained exertion that also happens to trigger reward centers. Although the phenomenon is fairly well known, it is nigh impossible to replicate in an ethical laboratory experiment, and therefore most commentary on it is necessarily based on the accounts of those who have experienced it, rather than more objective testing methods.

A lot of research on human psychology under stress has been done by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, who wrote On Killing and the later On Combat. One of Grossman's models describes stress as a function of heart rate, dividing different states of agitation by their effects on the human body. Following that model, a certain level of stress response is beneficial and indicative of a trained professional in action, whereas higher states of stress are encountered by those without training/experience, which degrades their performance. The red zone, found at 115 to 145 beats per minute, provides the best balance between heightened physical ability and control, whereas going above 175 beats per minute lands you in the black zone, where you experience deterioration of gross motor skills (fine motor skills go even before the red zone), loss of peripheral vision (the dreaded "tunnel vision") and auditory exclusion. Experience in law enforcement and military circles shows that the best way to reduce stress response to a useful level is training. Unfamiliar events and surroundings increase stress, while "thinking it through" becomes hard to impossible at the upper levels of stress response. On the other hand, thorough and realistic training allows complex movements to occur with minimal mental effort, lets you to get used to the sights and sounds of a combat encounter and increases your confidence in your own skills, all of which increase your ability to prevail. As the saying goes: train like you fight, fight like you train.

But even with the best training, the aggregate stress of combat can easily lead to lasting psychological scars if it is not treated promptly. For this reason, every modern military places some emphasis on unit rotation, ensuring that soldiers - if possible - do not remain in the fight for a prolonged amount of time. Once a soldier returns home, counseling is often the best way to deal with the experience of combat, giving the soldier a safe place to talk about his actions and feelings. Even so, it can be difficult to provide long-term care, and the increasing operational tempo in recent conflicts can stretch the psychological resources of an army just as sure as it taxes the equipment and the logistical capacity. In the field, psychological help for acute cases must also be combined with ample recreational activities that help soldiers work off stress and strengthen social bonds. Base exchanges, shows, a decent internet connection - all of those can help you keep your head on straight while deployed to a combat zone.

In a war that is 99% boredom and 1% sheer terror, the high-intensity engagements may be what books are written about, but Movie Wednesdays in the mess tent might just be the ounce of prevention that's worth a pound of cure.


	12. Chapter 12

Hello, everyone! This is Chapter 12, a little quicker than usual. Looks like my I'll be able to wrap this up next chapter, I've got a bit of an epilogue thing I need to cover. This chapter doesn't feature tech commentary (Gasp! Shock!) but instead some thoughts on the how and why of my version of Nathan. It's not exhaustive, but I hope you'll get some insight into my story thinking process.

On with the show!

---

Say what you will about Nathan Ambrose, but that night, he earned his paycheck.

"Ambrose, are you seeing this?" Jaime asked, her voice a constant companion through his headset. Nathan had sent all of his prior research and calculations to a virtual holding cell. The twin screens of his workstation were completely covered with Jaime's telemetry, one through gauges and meters, the other by displaying the snapshots transmitted from her bionic eye. Nathan pulled a few clear shots of the timing device's interior and opened them into an image processing program to get a better look at the details.  
"Blowing up the stills now," he replied. The dearth of wiring was odd - Nathan was no expert for explosive devices, but he would have recognized explosive charges and detonator caps.  
"Word choice, Ambrose!" Jaime growled. "I'm standing next to a bomb!"  
"Nope," Nathan said, short and sweet. "See, the good news is, it's not a bomb, probably."

Not that Nathan knew what it was, yet. Instead of rearranging the program windows, Nathan had simply covered the whole screen with the image he was looking at - better for finding details, but not so good for keeping track of Jaime's now hidden telemetry.

"Probably not a bomb," Jaime said. "Huh, that's a real relief. But of course now you're going to tell me the bad news, what it is instead, and it'll be worse."

"**Endorphin release,**" a soft female voice said. Given Nathan's multitasking requirements, the monitoring system was set up to avoid message pop-ups in favor of speech synthesis, tapping another sensory channel instead of adding to the visual overload. Not that he was paying a lot of attention to the message - it had been popping up all evening and merely signaled the operation of the mental safeguards, which made it quite tune-out-able. Besides, Nathan was far too busy rolling his eyes. Jaime Sommers had a habit of throwing his smartass right back at him when he really couldn't afford to be engaged in verbal sparring. It took all of his attention on the image to - _shit, are those valves?_

"I hate being predictable almost as much as saying that you're right," Nathan said, "but yes, that was what I was going to get to, the bad news part, which is really 'no good at all' very bad. Uh, not to scare you, Sommers, but you're looking at a high-pressure chemical dispersal system, designed to spray a really nasty chemical weapon right into the prevailing winds over the City. And it appears to be -"  
"On a clock, yes, I can see that for myself! How do we disarm it?"  
"I've got it," Jordan said, and the voice came through Nathan's headset distant and in low fidelity, just a low-bandwidth stream of Jaime's hearing. _Note to self, get direct jack into team radios,_ Nathan thought. "Mechanism for the pressure vessel, right? I can see some piping behind the PCBs, and this thing looks like a servo. If we can block the servo's movement, it can't open the valve."

Nathan hit the mute button on his headset.

"How fucking stupid can you be?" he shouted, venting a sudden burst of anger. He had the image right there, saw what Jordan had seen, but given the lack of any solid information whatsoever, it seemed just as likely as not that sabotaging the valve would set the device off early. They still had minutes on the clock, more than enough time to get their bearings and not charge right after the obvious booby-trap. Nathan collected his thoughts, took a deep breath and unmuted the connection. "Tell Sergeant Smartass that we can't be sure this is the main valve, the only main valve or even really a valve, not to mention the servo itself could be a red herring," he said. The finishing phrase - _EOD my ass!_ - remained unspoken.  
"**Heart rate dropping,**" the speech synth said. Nathan was still tuned out.  
"Ambrose thinks you're full of shit," Jaime said, moving the corners of Nathan's mouth just a bit upwards. Not quite the intricate message he had intended for her to relay, but it would do to keep the grunts from touching random components and making the situation worse. Nathan missed the stretched, unclear sounds of Jaime's voice.

"**Airflow below critical,**" the speech synth said. Somewhere in Nathan's brain, the association "critical = bad" clicked into place, and with that, his attention swung away from the not-bomb onto the matter of Jaime's condition. With a few clicks, he banished the still images and brought the telemetry gauges back up. There were a lot of details to keep track of, meters and toggles to rival a fighter cockpit, but also like a cockpit, the important ones stood out. Heart rate. Brain activity. Airflow to lungs. All of them were blinking red.

"I'm -" Jaime managed to croak into his ear.  
"**Endorphin release.**"  
"Shit," Nathan whispered. "What the fuck -"  
"Can't control," Jaime gasped. Nathan's eyes skipped from the 'shit be fucked up' meters to the 'how and why' ones: Jaime's stress levels, measured from a dozen weighted physiological factors, were just below the ceiling. The activity of the system's endorphin pumps - part of the psychological stability enhancements - was pegged solidly at maximum. _This is impossible, _he thought,_ this is literally fucking impossible. This can't be happening!_  
"**Heart rate below critical.**"  
"Sommers," he said, trying (but failing) to stay calm, "this is very important -"  
"Get out of - of -" was her response between fits of giggling.  
"What?" Nathan said. "I'm sorry, but..."

_Fuck, what is that?_ Nathan thought. _Chems, nanos, no, that would show up on the blood sensors. Sys diags green, no rogue killcode. What? What the fuck is it?_

---

"What would you have done instead?" Bledsoe asked.

"Morphine," Will said. "250 milligrams, just to make sure."

---

"Oh, fuck me," Nathan said. He tore his eyes off the screens and looked up to see Jonas Bledsoe approaching, attracted by the audio warnings. "Bledsoe, she's crashing!"

"**Airflow stopped. Respiratory drive failure,**" the synth said, adding a repeated warning. "**Endorphin release. Endorphin release. Endorphin release...**" Nathan turned down the audio volume of the warnings.

"What's the problem?" Bledsoe demanded.  
"The stability system...crashed," Nathan said. "It's flooding her with endorphins and shutting down her heart and lungs."  
"Is this going to kill her?" Bledsoe asked.  
"Uh, yeah, sure, eventually," Nathan said. "Not the problem, though. I need her to disarm the - doohickey, the not-bomb-thing. So if you could keep the grunts off it..."  
"I've got it," Bledsoe said. He pulled up a chair at the next workstation and opened a new telemetry link to Jaime's implants. The remote system access was far from perfect, with many useful options still only available via a command line interface, but the communications subsystem was covered by nice, friendly icons. Bledsoe linked the cellphone connection with the radio transceiver in Jaime's arm, jacking into the tactical team's radios. "Palace to Hitman, come in."  
"Uh, this is Hitman," Ginsburg's voice answered with a hint of surprise. "We read you, Palace, go ahead."  
"Hitman, I need a countdown on the device."  
"Stand by, Palace." A pause. "Countdown is two - two - eight. We're looking at it right now, and -"  
"Don't touch it," Bledsoe said.  
"Ah," Ginsburg said. "We, uh, we copy that, Palace, don't touch the device. What about Tin Man?"  
"Being fixed as we speak, Hitman."

Bledsoe looked over to Nathan's workstation. The screen was now positively cluttered with open windows, most of them big blobs of text.

"Tell me good news, Ambrose," Bledsoe said.  
"Uh, I didn't compromise system security with undocumented backdoors?" Nathan replied, quickly skimming through his own documentation on the control software for Jaime's implants. "Seemed like a good idea at the time, but inconvenient now that I'm trying to break the system myself."  
"Just switch it off," Bledsoe suggested.  
"...I _am_ the only one who read the software specs, huh?" Nathan said. "Explicitly verboten - if that module goes dark, the entire system shuts down. Security measure."  
"Countdown at two - zero - zero, Palace," Ginsburg added. "I say again, countdown at two minutes."  
"Point of order," Nathan said, "even if I get the pumps disabled, we'll need to hit her with some go-juice. Uh, like, epinephilim - no, epinecromancer...epidermis? Noooo. Ah, dammit, you know, that - adrenaline stuff."  
"Epinephrine," Bledsoe said cooly and nodded. "Palace to Hitman, get a first aid kit to Tin Man. She needs epinephrine. Stand by for dosage when you're ready." Bledsoe turned to Nathan again. "How much epinephrine?"  
"I don't know!" Nathan replied. "How _would_ I know?"  
"They have a kit," Bledsoe said. "They use pens. That narrow it down?"  
"Ah, okay, not really, just - " Nathan rolled his eyes upward - "just stick her until she's on her feet."  
"Okay, we'll figure that out later," Bledsoe said. "The pumps?"  
"Can't go, I'm counting at least twenty module dependencies, so we're - _wait a minute_. I can lie!" Nathan shouted with a grin. "I can fucking lie! Hah, I think I just outsmarted myself." With renewed confidence, he clicked on a few buttons (apparently bringing up an existing file) and launched into a furious typing mania. Bledsoe looked over his shoulder and saw him working on the text, rewriting some numbers at the beginning. For a code segment, it seemed almost nice, with a mostly readable syntax and a few comments. Most of what Bledsoe had seen of Nathan's production code looked...denser.  
"Countdown at one - three - zero, Palace," Ginsburg said, beginning to sound - to put it mildly - nervous. "Epi ready on your go."  
"What are you -" Bledsoe began, but Nathan cut him off.  
"Shush! Genius at work! Give me three, two, one -"

Nathan tapped the Enter key in the way a great opera conductor might swing his baton for the final note of a grand performance.

"Thank god for version control," Nathan said, "I just pulled the old debug stub, switched the version number and threw it at the autopatcher. Compiled, signed, uploaded. Now we just need to reboot the system -"  
"How long is that going to take?" Bledsoe asked.  
"**Remote unit online. All systems nominal,**" the computer said softly.  
Nathan cracked a wide grin. "He shoots! _He scores!_ Nathan Ambrose wins the day again!"  
"Hitman!" Bledsoe growled, "Epi, **now!**"

---

The principal difficulty of applying autoinjectors to Jaime was in finding the right spot, as Antoine Ginsburg could attest. In first aid training, everything was simple - autoinjectors go into the meat of the thigh, case closed. But that only applied to, well, humans - not to a person with two bionic legs. Ginsburg had settled on opening the quick release on Jaime's tactical vest and pulling up her shirt - getting one of those injectors stuck in the belly wouldn't be pretty, but there was, at least, a decent chance that it would _work_.

Nothing left but to do it.

With a mighty stab, he plunged the epi-pen's needle into Jaime's abdomen, adding half a milligram of epinephrine to her already destabilized system. It wasn't quite "Two wrongs make a right", but that was as good a way as any to describe the plan from the men sitting in the operations central. After a moment, Jaime groaned and moved weakly, though a sudden miraculous return to full awareness seemed a distant possibility at best. Ginsburg stole another glance at the device's countdown and found his superior sense of timing at work again.

"Countdown at one - zero - zero, negative on Tin Man," he radioed. "We're down to a minute; permission to kiss our asses good-bye, Palace?"  
Bledsoe managed to make his scowl audible through the communications link. "We're not done yet. Use all remaining pens, Hitman. I say again, all pens."

Nothing like a last hurrah, Ginsburg thought, gathered the two remaining pens from the first aid kit and stabbed them into Jaime's belly, one in each hand. That produced a result; after a few seconds, Jaime's eyes flew wide open. She looked at Ginsburg. She looked at the three autoinjectors sticking out of her.

She screamed.

Ginsburg had to hold her down; with little thought to tenderness, he used his free hand to rip the pens out of Jaime and discard them.  
"You're okay!" he shouted. "You're okay!"  
"What - what - the fuck?" Jaime replied in kind.  
_No time for explanations, _Nathan's voice sounded in her head._ We need you for another minute, Sommers, just a minute and then you can freak out all you want, okay?_

Jaime's breathing was as fast and deep as she could make it; her left hand was trembling quite spectacularly, making for a motif she couldn't remove her gaze from.

_Forget the damn hand! _Nathan shouted._ Your right arm in the device guts, __**now**__._  
Maybe it was that Jaime was already deadened to the rollercoaster ride of the evening, or that her specific state of shock made her more susceptible to being ordered around, or perhaps Nathan actually shouting at her for the first time. However you want to explain it, Jaime shoved Ginsburg out of her way and scrambled madly for the device. Some of the distance, she covered on her feet, some on her knees. It didn't matter.  
"I'm here!" she said breathlessly.  
_Okay, careful now! _Nathan said.  
"Countdown at zero - three - zero," Ginsburg dutifully radioed.  
_You see that valve in the back? You need to reach in there, grab it and keep it closed, with all your strength. But the whole casing is studded with what looks like accelerometers. You have to go slow and keep absolutely steady. Any bumps and this thing goes._  
"That's nuts!"  
_I know. You're the only one who can do this._

The seconds ticked away as Jaime slowly raised her right arm and reached deeper into the bowels of the weapon release mechanism.

"I'm playing Operation with the whole city," Jaime said to herself.  
"Countdown at zero - one - five!"  
_Steady..._  
Jaime closed her eyes. "God, don't -"

The device sounded an ear-splittingly loud single beep; Ginsburg, already focused on the countdown display, watched it jump to zero. Reflexively, he held his breath.

---

The comm system reproduced Jaime's groan with astounding fidelity. Nathan took a deep breath and made a "Phew!" sound.

"I've got it," her voice came, clear as day in Nathan's headset. "I've got the valve!" The speakers - both from the connection to Jaime's bionic ear and the link to the tactical team's radios - were filled with cheering.  
"I'm - I'm -" he stammered helplessly for a moment, trying to process the tangle of thoughts in his head. The chaos only cleared when he heard Bledsoe speak next to him.  
"Are you feeling any resistance from the valve, Miss Sommers?" Bledsoe said.  
"I did for a few seconds," Jaime said. "It jumped as soon as I touched it, but I got it before it could unlock. It struggled for a bit but then it stopped. And I'm - what is that smell? It's like a - it smells like a broken TV."  
"That would, ah," Nathan cut in, "I think you blocked the servo. Must have eaten itself in the struggle."  
"Wow," Jaime said.

A part of Nathan - well, okay, most of Nathan - considered telling Jaime about the power-to-weight ratio of dumb servos the size of which she'd outwrestled, that they would not require very much resistance at all to gleefully destroy themselves, and that, therefore, this wasn't as good of a test for the strength of her bionic arm as she might have thought. He held his tongue. This, perhaps more than any other event of the evening, fell under the auspices of the term "miracle". But Nathan was no saint; one line held back did not make for an effective dam to all of his thoughts, and knowing that he had to express himself, he hit the mute button on his headset, leaving Jaime to bask in her victory.

"I can think of at least a dozen ways this could have - no, should have - gone horribly, horribly fucking wrong," Nathan said. "And I don't know the first thing about IEDs. Did we just win the goddamn lottery or what? I mean, what the hell just happened, old man, huh? It's wild!"  
"...old man?" Bledsoe replied, somehow managing to draw out and emphasize every single letter.  
"Ah, I'm -" Nathan looked to Bledsoe, where - for the moment - bemusement was still winning out over scowling. "That was, uh, nothing, Mr. Bledsoe, Sir."

---

The mop-up, such as it was, took the better part of the next hour. While Jaime still held onto the valve for fear of it being opened by some hidden mechanism, the soldiers dealt with the slightly more mundane issues: intercepting the police patrol cars that finally rolled up as response to the gunfire and selling the cops their hastily-arranged cover story, searching the rest of the building for hidden equipment or enemies, and finally clearing a landing zone for the helicopter. After a while, more people flooded in: bomb squad, FBI SWAT, the fire department's Hazardous Material Team.

It was okay to let go then. Jaime did, got up and worked her way through the crowd, all of whom busied themselves getting good looks at the device. She heard the beginnings of jurisdictional squabbles and saw the pervasive baffledness on their faces, but that, too, was no longer her problem. When she left the building, the midnight air outside was cool and dusty. Ginsburg, Jordan and Calavera were already waiting for her, as was the idling Berkut helo. Jaime chanced a look at the highway stretching above; even through the engine noise and the bustle surrounding the building, she could still hear the cars driving up above. The city, at large, didn't seem to care about how close it had come to destruction. That was, perhaps, the only healthy attitude to take.

"You dropped this," Calavera said, and handed Jaime her discarded P226 pistol. She offered him a weak smile, took the gun and ran it through a quick safety check before pushing it back into the drop holster with a satisfying click. Together, Jaime and the soldiers approached the helicopter, taking care to duck under its main rotor, and climbed in. The inside of the helo's rear cabin felt more familiar this time, as if getting into it tired but satisfied after a long night triggered a memory of the day before's fuzzy events. Ginsburg was the last in and pulled the door shut from inside; the engines howled and spooled up just as he found his seat and strapped in. Momentarily, Jaime felt the helicopter lift off, taking to the skies again. They rose above the highway, affording Jaime a good look at the rest of the city: still lit up, still alive.

And so, it was back to Wolf Creek.

---

They put her through the tests in the examination room again, blood and skin samples, implant checks, everything but asking Jaime her favorite color. Through it all, she remained strangely wired, not like the forced wakefulness of the implants but in a distantly familiar way. It took her a while to recognize it, but finally, she made the connection. She was awake like she had been when they took Becca to the hospital.

Another fine example of the Jaime Sommers effect. Another cruel thing she'd rather not be reminded of.

Will wasn't there for the check-ups, just some of the medical staff Jaime hadn't gotten to know. The same male nurse. Jaime didn't get to ask his name, either. They weren't talking to her. Her clothes were in a trash bin. Again.

---

In the conference room, the team was assembled - Bledsoe in the middle, talking; Kim by himself as usual; Truewell and Will, just back from Paradise, and Nathan in a corner trying not shiver. Will was nursing a cup of a liquid that bore as much resemblance to coffee as the sun did to a lightbulb. It went down his throat like engine grease, but it kept him awake.

"We've all had a long day and I'll keep this brief," Bledsoe began. "We've done our job. Good results, expectations exceeded. Just what we needed. Good work, everyone."

The room was quiet. Bledsoe continued after giving it a second to sink it.

"That said, we're left with a lot of loose ends. We don't know who the bad guys are. I've forwarded what we've found out to our contacts in the community, and I hope we'll have a better idea of who we're up against at the end of the week. But whoever they are, they've got a head start on us. Anthros, you've gotten a look at the weapon. Anything you'd like to add to your preliminary?"  
"Um, no," Will said groggily. "Not really. I'll need lab time with the original agent."  
"That's a given", Bledsoe said. "The bulk of the weapon has been turned over to the Army's Chemical Corps for destruction. We'll get a few samples to work with."  
"Ah, okay," Will said.  
"Next point on the agenda is the malfunction in Miss Sommers's implants." Bledsoe paused for a moment. "We can't afford horseshit like that. We can't afford 'teething problems'. We can't afford 'Oops!'. I want stepped-up testing of all components and a full code audit on the control software before we make any other modifications."  
"Uh, Sir," Nathan began, but Bledsoe cut him off.  
"And I'm aware that you can't do that on your own, Ambrose. We're critically short-handed, as the last few days have shown. I can't change the OpTempo. What I can do is make sure we're not doing this by ourselves. I'm put in an emergency request that Wolf Creek be brought up to full operational staffing as soon as possible. We'll just have to hold the fort down a little longer. Now, I think we all deserve some sleep for tonight. Truewell, Anthros, I want to speak to you two in my office. The rest of you are at liberty until Thursday oh-eight-hundred. Dismissed."

With 'the rest of you' constituting Nathan and Kim, the two loners shot each other a glance and made for the door. Kim was the first out, followed by Nathan. Will thought he heard the computer specialist strike up a conversation with Kim, but the door closed too quickly behind them to get any inkling of the content. Will was fairly sure it didn't concern him, anyway. After a moment's sip on his cup to finish the coffee, he walked outside, trying to prepare himself for whatever the morning still had in store for him.

One of those things, it turned out, was Jaime.

She was leaning against the wall next to the door, dressed once more in government-issue sweatclothes and not looking all too thrilled about it. But then she noticed Will, and her face lit up. Will deployed a counter-smile just in time for her to push off the wall and step up to him.

"Hey," she said, drawing the greeting out as if to showcase a peculiar half-pout. "Where have **you** been?"  
"Just a little road trip," Will said. "Hello, Jaime. Are you okay?" His hand brushed her face softly.  
"I'm beat," Jaime said. "Can we talk later, I need to -"  
"Miss Sommers," Bledsoe said, stepping out of the door frame just enough to let Truewell pass; she walked off down the hallway, and Will looked after her wondering if he should follow.  
"I need to talk to Mr. Bledsoe," Jaime said. "Alone, please."

Will gave Jaime a quick peck on the cheek, then jogged after Truewell. Jaime watched him go; Bledsoe had his gaze locked solidly onto her face.

"Hell of a scrape you got yourself into," Bledsoe said. "I didn't think the lab would let you walk out."  
"If all the tests check out, you don't keep a piece of _equipment_ for observation," Jaime said. "You don't ask a 78 million dollar _weapon system_ how it's doing, right?"  
"Poked and prodded you, hm? Engineering degrees don't teach the best bedside manner. It's a bad habit, but it is a habit, and after a few years of static testing, it's hard to break."  
"I'm serious, Mr. Bledsoe. I deserve to be treated like a real fucking person. Look me in the eyes, use my name, shake my hand, all that good social interaction stuff. Send out a memo, sign them up for a teamwork seminar - I don't care **how** you do it, but get it through their skulls."  
"I'd like to say you've just caught us at a bad time," Bledsoe said, "but that doesn't excuse everything. We're working on it. And the malfunction -"  
"- haywire implant," Jaime said, tapping her forehead. "I'm not in the mood to argue about this. **That** has to stop."  
"The plug is pulled, pending a full code audit. We'll get it working right."  
"No. I mean everything that's messing with my brain. The head voices, the 'emotional stability', combat mode, the -" Jaime's eyes clenched shut. "Son of a -" she cursed.  
"Headache?" Bledsoe asked.  
"I get these - attacks," Jaime said, forcing her eyes back open. "They told me I've got some swelling. In my brain."  
"Concussion, stress and overstimulation will do that to you," Bledsoe said.

He offered his hand; Jaime took it. With his help, she managed to crouch against the wall. Bledsoe walked to a water dispenser down the hall and filled a plastic cup, then brought it back with him and offered it to Jaime. She thanked him with a nod and took a few careful sips.

"Maybe we can figure out a way to get some use out of your brain implants when we're sure they won't accidentally kill you," Bledsoe said. "Throw out the automation and put them under your direct control."  
"They're out," Jaime said emphatically. "They're out and that's that."  
"Of course. You should get some rest, Miss Sommers. God knows you deserve it."  
"Yeah, that sounds like - sounds fine."  
"There's a couch in the break room down that way," Bledsoe offered. "Come on, I'll steady you."

---

Waiting in Bledsoe's office was attacking Will's nerves at a prodigious rate. He sat on the strangely homely couch tucked into a corner, face buried in his hands, and looked to the entrance. Truewell stood in front of Bledsoe's desk, arms discreetly folded behind her back.

"What did you tell him?" Will asked, not looking up. "What did you say to him?"  
"I didn't leave anything out, if that's your question", Truewell replied, no hint of malice about her. "This isn't the right time or place for secrets, Dr. Anthros."  
Will laughed nervously.  
"You can get your 'Ha ha, CIA people are professional liars' joke out of the way now," Truewell said. "I've heard them all."  
"No, it's not that - do I look like I'm in the mood for jokes?" Will asked.

The door opened to admit its master. Jonas Bledsoe stepped into the room as if expected the fire to be stoked and dinner ready to be served.

"Sir?" Truewell said quietly. "We're ready for you."  
"Good, good," Bledsoe said. He closed the door behind him, then swept past Truewell, climbed past his desk and idly pushed the chair behind it away, preferring to simply stand. "I'm sorry for the delay, but I had to reassure Miss Sommers. You can have a seat, Truewell."  
"If you don't mind, Sir, I'd rather stand," Truewell said.  
"Fair enough. Now, I've skimmed over both of your preliminary reports, and of course I talked to Truewell while you were still in the Paradise area. Which brings me to you, Anthros."  
_Bend over, _Will thought,_ here it comes._  
"I think you should take the next two weeks off," Bledsoe said.  
"...excuse me?" Will said, expecting a straight cross but instead reeling from a kidney punch. He suddenly noticed that being the only sitting person in the room placed him at a height disadvantage, so he took the opportunity to rise up and stand next to Truewell. "Mr. Bledsoe, this is a critical stage in our project. I've got my hands full with supervising the implants, and soon I'll have the agent samples to go over."  
"Mr. Kim and Ambrose can take care of the implants, and we're not the only ones who will get samples," Bledsoe said. "Further, it's clear to me that you're suffering from a lot of stress over the events of the last days."  
"Yes, but -"  
"That brings us to the matter of your unsanctioned stimulant use," Bledsoe said, and his expression darkened. "I like to think you're fairly smart, Anthros. I'm willing to write this off as a lapse in judgment on your part, and in recognition of your contributions to our cause, I'm going to skip the part where I tell you to drop trou and submit a urine sample while two of my men hover over your shoulder. I think you can still be brought around without resorting to humiliating you in front of your peers and your girlfriend. But let me be clear: drug abuse does not count as 'personal eccentricity'. It does not happen under my watch. I take pains to keep a clean house, Anthros. You're at two strikes. A third fuck-up will not be tolerated. It will not even begin to happen, because the minute I get any indication that you're going maverick on me again, I will have you pulled and put into storage."

Will blinked. It was a good blink, slow and deliberate. It didn't help, though.

"The next two weeks are either a vacation or a suspension - your choice," Bledsoe said plainly. "Pull yourself back together, Anthros. Find a new place to live and spend time with your girlfriend. I assume two weeks will be ample time for detox, too. Do you have any problems with that, Anthros?"  
Will unclenched his teeth. "No, Sir," he said quietly, "I understand, Sir."  
"Goddammit, Anthros, don't ever put me in this position again," Bledsoe said, shaking his head softly. "I left Miss Sommers in the break room. Now get your ass out of my office. Dismissed."

---

Jaime was slumped onto a leather couch, her head on the armrest and her legs pulled in. As sleeping positions went, this was a few hairs under acceptable, mostly from the uncomfortable toughness of the leather. But with a pounding head and some paracetamol in her system, it wasn't the right time to move, either. What alternatives did she have? She'd be damned if she dragged herself into one of the hospital beds, and a drive home wasn't in the cards either. Jaime shifted her weight slightly. She'd slept in worse places.

She could recognize the rhythm of Will's footsteps coming down the hallway, painting a smile on her lips. She turned and opened her eyes when he entered the room, and ended up looking directly at a ceiling light. She quietly cursed and looked away, letting a small groan escape her mouth. A second later, she felt Will's lips against her cheek. She put her arms around him and pulled him in for a proper kiss.

"Hello again," he said. "I brought blankets."  
"Hey, you," Jaime said weakly. "Where did you get blankets?"  
"Stopped at my lab and plundered the hammock," Will said. "So, I've got a soft one, and a snuggly one. Oh, and some pillows."  
"What's the difference," Jaime said, "between the soft one - and the snuggly one?"  
"I'm, uh," Will said, "they feel differently?"  
"Hold 'em out," Jaime commanded. Will offered up both, and she felt them blindly with her left arm. "Soft, please."

Will unrolled the soft blanket and laid it on top of Jaime's body; she pulled the edge up to her neck, while he helped tuck the material under her body. After a little squirming, a content smile spread over Jaime's face.

"Did you know that this room is 3 degrees warmer than the others?" Jaime said softly.  
"It's still pretty cold," Will said.  
"No kidding. Are you sure you guys paid your heating bill?"  
Will chuckled. "Well, we did just spend -"  
"- 78 million dollars," Jaime said. "That's going to take forever to pay back on a government salary."  
"Hey, now, don't say that," Will said. "I can pitch in, you know."  
"Half of forever, then," Jaime replied. "Can you get the lights, Will?"  
"Uh, sure," Will said.

He walked over to the break room's entrance, closed the door and hit the light switch. That left the sparse illumination from the vending machine (of which Will suddenly wondered who restocked that thing), just enough for him to find his way back to a leather chair and pull it up next to the couch. He stuffed a pillow behind his lower back and one behind his neck, then laid back and spread the snuggly blanket as well as he could.

"Good night, Jaime," he said. He didn't get an answer.

Jaime's second day on the job was officially over.

* * *

**Character Commentary:** Nathan Ambrose

So, I have a problem with the way the series treated Nathan.

He didn't even get a last name in the series. The limited screentime he got just didn't work out in his favor, which is a pity because I kind of liked the idea of having a "lower decks" kind of character who wasn't always so deadly serious. Unfortunately, it left a fairly serious plot hole: with Will Anthros dead in the pilot, Nathan was the only character shown to work on the technical aspects of Jaime's implants, but only in the context of some low-tech fixes. It was as if Berkut couldn't muster any dedicated experts.

To fix this, I wanted a sort of three-way split between Nathan, Will and Jae Kim for the bionics. Will would mostly bring his surgical expertise and cover the nanotechnology angle. Kim, as I hope to show off soon, is responsible for the biomechanics of how Jaime's movements work and involved with the nerve/implant interface work. (I don't know what the hell 'Endophysics' is supposed to mean, but that's another rant...) That left the software and communications angle for Nathan. I don't think a lot of people pay attention to this bit, but any modern computer-based system needs a hideous amount of coding done, often in an obtuse programming language on a system that can be surprisingly low-spec. In terms of power, military-grade hardened computers are so far behind the curve of civilian tech it's not even funny, but that's the price you pay for resisting impact, shock and radiation as well as fulfilling rigid standards in reliability and redundancy.

Now, working off that bit, who's my Nathan Ambrose? He's older than you'd think - past thirty (as mentioned once in the pilot and shamefully not repeated so far), which puts him several years over Will and Jaime. He's got advanced degrees in computer engineering and communications engineering, and like many computer geeks, he relishes opportunities to learn new things, which has given him a good practical knowledge of cryptography and electronics, among others. However, he also tends to be a little...unprofessional. Even after a few years of working at Berkut, he's still got a disposition that seems more at home at a LAN party than in a secret government organization.

Nathan's dynamic with Jaime approaches the classical "straight man operative, wacky tech guy in the van" dynamic, but I've tried to put a little twist on it. Nathan's got power over Jaime, and to a degree he really likes that. He sees himself as the godlike operator handing down wisdom like manna from heaven. In his mind, Jaime's lost out there without him. He has a hard time accepting her as intelligent when her fields of expertise - literature, bartending and other assorted odds and ends - are so alien to him, and admittedly, watching Jaime try to adapt to her new abilities doesn't help his first impression. But Jaime's not easily cowed, and she's already working on clawing her way up on top of their relationship. It'll be some time before they've truly figured out where they stand.

And Nathan is oddly deferential to Will. It's easy to suspect that, given Will's combination of degrees in medicine and chemical engineering at a relatively young age, Nathan figures him for a one in a billion genius. Not to say that Nathan isn't extremely intelligent - but Will is pushing frontiers and working on truly visionary technologies. It seems you can't spend a lot of time working around someone like that without either developing hero worship or a grudge.

One of my scribbled notes says "Nathan is not harmless". I hope I can show you why that's true.


	13. Chapter 13 Finale

Welcome to the 13th and final chapter of "Paradise Regained", loyal readers! I said I would end it here, but I didn't say it'd be regular length.

Mucho props go out to my man Kasey Kagawa, who - as of this chapter - isn't just responsible for all the good ideas, but also actually co-writing with me. If people start showing actual emotional range from here on, blame him. ;)

You've probably noticed that I stepped up the pace to push this one and the previous chapter out. That's because I have some other things to take care of, but couldn't get started on them with this story still hanging over my head. So, the next story might take a while - maybe it won't start until 2010. But I hope that when I do start it, I'll be less distracted, better organized and equipped with better pacing. (Let my fail be a lesson to you: get your subplots straight *before* you start writing.)

No commentary on this one, because it was written in a marathon session in 1/3rd the time of the other chapters yet is almost twice as long.

Okay, I'm just rambling at this point. Enjoy the show, and keep your eyes open for the next story. Jaime Sommers WILL RETURN IN "Big Sister".

---

Jaime's wake-up call came in the form of 125 pounds of weight on top of her, a vague sensation of pressure and warmth rising to the acute awareness of somebody lying on top of her, cheek to cheek. Then Will snored next to her ear and shifted slightly, breaking the poetic nature of the moment, but Jaime smiled anyway. The buzzing of the vending machine's fluorescent lighting drove her the rest of the way into wakefulness, as the rest of the Berkut break room slowly came into focus.

"Will," she said, "wake up."  
That didn't get much of a reaction, so she squirmed a little underneath him.  
"Will, please climb down."  
More snoring.  
"You know, if I get up, you'll end up on the floor," Jaime whispered jokingly.  
Will stirred briefly, but then settled back down.  
"Floor it is, then," Jaime said, and started to sit up.  
That got Will's attention quickly; with groggily moaned excuses, he half-slipped, half-climbed off her, rolling onto his side with a tired achiness in every move. Jaime wondered if maybe throwing him to the ground after all would have been less awkward.  
"Morning, Jaime," Will moaned, managing a half-smile through the pain of detoxing.  
"Good morning. The chair was too cold, hm?" Jaime asked.  
"In my defense, you took the good blanket," Will said. "Also, you're much more comfortable than the chair to sleep on."  
"You old charmer," Jaime said. "Nice to hear I'm better than a piece of furniture."

Will's smile couldn't untie the knot in her stomach. The morning didn't feel quite right, like there was something she was supposed to be doing, but wasn't.  
"Oh my God, Becca," Jaime said. "I left her alone last night and -"  
"She'll be alright," Will said. "Come on, she's 16. She can handle a night without you."  
"What about her breakfast?" Jaime asked, running her hands through her hair. "And how's she going to get to school? She's going to be so upset -"  
"Jaime," Will said, a little more forceful than necessary, "she'll be okay. Really. She'll be fine for now. We need to take care of ourselves first, alright?"  
"She's my sister," Jaime said, "I think that legally entitles me to all the worrying in the world." She sighed. "But I guess you're right." Jaime stood up and stretched. "I need a shower, I'm still dirty and...bloody." She shivered. "I'd like to get that off of me."  
"I could help with that," Will said.

---

Becca wasn't awake. At least that's what she tried to convince herself of. Her hand reached out for the alarm clock that shook her bedframe, trying to turn it off. It clearly couldn't be trying to wake her up, because this was a dream, right? There was still time to sleep, time to get rest. The alarm and the light shining on her face weren't there, just clever tricks her brain was playing on her for an unknown but undoubtedly nefarious reason.

Her hand slapped the side of her bed and didn't find anything. This required more activity than a half-sleeping teenage brain could handle; by the time she'd tapped around enough to find it and hit the snooze button, the fight against being awake was already lost. Becca went limp, letting her arm droop over the edge of the mattress, and considered her options. Going back to sleep was right out. The rational part of her brain - in situations like this, always the bad guy - told her that trying to go back to sleep was not an option. But lying in bed? Just a few more minutes? The lazy part of her brain made a good case for that. Hey, lying limp in a cozy bed and closing your eyes is kind of like sleep, right?

The alarm clock went off again. This time, Becca refused to dignify it with even a single movement; she merely mumbled a weak "Shut up" and left it at that. Her hearing loss was now coming up to almost 10 years - but she still remembered, faintly, how annoying the beeping of a regular alarm clock was, and concluded that it wasn't half as bad as feeling your entire bed vibrate underneath you. After a minute of this, Becca finally resolved to get up. Grab a hot shower. Have a nice breakfast - Jaime was probably already working on that.

"And math," Becca said to herself when she climbed out of the bed. Her binder and textbook were still on her desk, already opened to the right pages. A glance at the clock showed her at 15 minutes later than when she'd intended to get up - okay, quick hot shower, then. She stumbled out of her room and closed the door behind her. The bathroom was cold, to her displeasure, which left her wondering how Jaime had showered in the cold. It was then that Becca's thought process, finally fully accounted for, integrated this morsel of information with the lack of Jaime in the kitchen - and, as a quick check revealed, her room.

So she hadn't come back home last night. That meant Becca would have to toast her own bagels - alright, doable -, make her own tea - also simple - and take the bus to school. That last one was a bit of a sticking point, because that meant leaving a good deal earlier, and a bit of quick math on Becca's part led her to the conclusion that she had about twenty minutes to get ready.

Becca cursed.

---

On Jaime's second visit to the showers, the room looked dimmer than she remembered it, and owing to the early hour of the morning the heat was still off. Still, it couldn't keep her from getting out of the sweatclothes. The cold of the air was distant, and with careful steps, she approached one of the showerheads and turned it on.

Hot water solves a stunning amount of problems.

After enjoying the rising feeling of heat from her toes to her shoulders, Jaime relaxed a little, ran her hands through her hair and even allowed herself a small smile again. The small, warm rain of water was like armor, leaving her far removed from the world and the trouble that waited there for her. For now, she was safe.

The door to her shower cubicle opened, and Will stepped in; Jaime briefly recoiled for no reason she could find, but after a second the relaxed feeling returned, and she showed her smile to him. Under the shower, Will looked mostly lithe, with just a bit of flab around his stomach area. He noticed her attention and smiled back.

At that point, the kiss was pretty much inevitable.

The two of them leaned against the back wall of the cubicle, feeling the warmth of the water and each other's bodies in their embrace. The hot water was above them, around them, between them. In the intensity of the moment, Will's hands grabbed her arms, holding them so tightly that they ached, feeding the moment and her excitement.

At least, her left arm did. The right merely dutifully reported the pressure. Jaime's part of the embrace slackened; she released her lips from Will's, and after a moment, she softly pushed him away from her.

"What's wrong?" Will asked.  
"It doesn't feel right," Jaime said quietly. "It's not right, my arm, it doesn't feel real." She looked at her bionic arm, the water swiftly sheeting off of it, like off the windshield of a car. "It doesn't even look real. Will, it -"  
"Shhh," Will said softly. "It's different. I know. But it's okay, Jaime. I'll make it right. Just tell me what should be different, and I can have a better one made up."  
"I don't want a better one," Jaime said, backing into the corner and folding into herself. "I just - I just..." Neither of them know what exactly to say. "Maybe you should go," Jaime said slowly. Her skull was an echo chamber for the pounding headache that expanded to fill every crack of space inside it.  
Will took a step towards her. "Jaime, just tell me what's wrong -"  
"Get back!" Jaime shouted, surprised at the strength of her own outburst. Her arms assumed a defensive posture by themselves, and her lip started to tremble. "Get back, Will. Get back."

Will's expression grew serious. He raised his hands slowly and backed out of the cubicle, closing the door behind him.

"I'll - I'll just take this shower, okay?" he said. She heard his bare feet pad off to the other end of the showers. A door slid open and closed far away from her. Another showerhead turned on. The water still rained onto her, long streams and droplets heading downward over her body while she tried to get a grip onto what had just happened between her and Will. After a while, she turned her back to the door, faced the wall and let the water stream over her face. Her head spinning, she clenched the right hand into a fist, drew the arm back and punched the wall. The tiles splintered with a sharp crack, as if she needed more proof of the inhuman power that occupied the place her arm should be.

Slowly, she drew the fist away from the impact zone and looked. The smartskin covering on the knuckles was intact, but sharp splinters from the tile were stuck in the fingers. There was no pain, only pressure. One by one, she pulled out the splinters and dropped them; the cuts in the synthetic skin closed shortly thereafter.

_What are you?_ she thought, as if the machine could answer her. _You're not me. That's __**not**__ me._

---

Jaime stepped out of the shower to find Will sitting on one of the wooden benches, already dried off and dressed. With a small smile, he handed her a towel.

"I'm sorry," she stammered, "I didn't -"  
"It's okay," Will said. "I'm...I'm not surprised, really."  
"That's comforting," Jaime said.  
"I'm sorry for this," Will said. "For all of this. I had my head stuck up my ass for the last few days, and you seemed to be taking it well - I didn't pay as much attention as I should have, or explain things very well."  
"Like what you do," she said, taking a seat on the bench next to Will.  
"It was top secret," Will said, "it **is** top secret. I never even thought it would come up with you, I didn't...I didn't mean for things to happen the way they did. But they did and I've tried to make the best of it, but that's still not very good, is it? The top pick out of a whole universe of bad choices."  
"You could have told me something, anything that was close to the truth. But you didn't."  
"Don't you think I thought about that?" Will replied with a hint of anger. "What could I have told you? I work for the government? My work is classified? I'm not really who you think I am? Think about what could happen if people find out what I'm doing here, Jaime. I didn't want to lie to you. I wanted to tell you everything. But I couldn't."  
"You just had to protect me," Jaime said.  
"Yes, Jaime," Will said. "I had to protect you." He paused for a second. "I had to protect both of us. I'm sorry. Tell me what to do to make it up to you, and I'll do it."  
Jaime looked at her right arm, then back at Will. "I want to see the arm. The real thing, without the fake skin."  
"I - I don't know if that's such a good idea," Will said.  
"No more lies, Will," Jaime said. "I want to know the truth about what this thing is. Show it to me."  
"Okay, if you really want to," Will said with a sigh. "But it'll look a little...freaky."  
"Everything's a little freaky now," Jaime said with an attempted smile. "I can deal with freaky."

"Okay," Will said. He scooted up next to her on the bench, pulled his ID badge out of his pocket, and ran it over her shoulder, at the fine black line, the gap between where her body stopped and her bionic arm began. The synthetic skin there puffed out a bit, creating a pocket.  
"I can feel that," Jaime said. "It's like...tickling."  
"Are you absolutely double-strength sure you want to see this?" Will asked.  
"Oh, don't make a show out of it," Jaime replied. "Just -"

Will grabbed the synthetic skin and, in one quick jerk, peeled it back to the elbow. The first thing that struck Jaime was how oddly familiar it looked. Instead of pistons, cables and hoses, it looked more like the iPod version of her copy of Gray's Anatomy. The mechanism underneath was mostly matte white, bundled electropolymer fibers making up the meat of it. Jaime spotted a whole forest worth of details - yellowish translucent tubes filled with Ichor, small wiring, a fine surface mesh, diagnostic lights, a connection port, minuscule contractions traveling through the entire arm. In a word, it looked alive, eerily so - just a few degrees off from how an arm should look, but still worlds apart.

"It's an arm," Will said softly. "Muscles, bones, joints, sinews and blood vessels - they're all there. It's built instead of grown, but...it's an arm."  
"Wow," Jaime managed to say. She flexed the arm and saw the electropolymer fibers at work, contracting and lenghtening in sync with her movements. Everything moved smoothly. No clacking relays, no grinding gears. Just raw, mechanical elegance. "Can I pull it off?"  
"Uh, sure," Will said, looking around. "It's clean enough here."

Jaime took a deep breath, grabbed the loose smartskin and peeled it. With her pull behind it, the skin separated and loosened where necessary, until the fingers slipped out. Jaime held what looked like an opera glove of synthetic skin in her left hand, but her gaze was locked on the right hand, its mechanics now exposed. The delicate fingers show the individual electropolymer strands making up the muscles, wrapping over polished metal joints, hair-thin wires and minuscule tubes of Ichor.

"The knuckle joints are 10,000 dollars each," Will said. "Titanium alloy for strength, bonded to carbon nanofibers and synthetic polymers for smoothness. The upper knuckles are reinforced as impact surfaces. That protects the hand when you're...punching stuff."  
Jaime moved the fingers experimentally, dozens of status lights blinking from red to green as their individual muscles contracted and expanded. "That's good, with all the punching I do..."  
"Finding the materials that can withstand the full power of your arm wasn't exactly easy."

Jaime's eyes wandered back up to her shoulder, where the border of the smartskin transitioned into tender natural skin. Jaime touched the biological part of her shoulder and felt it, a touch instead of pressure. It was the only part of her arm that told the truth: Jaime's arm had been amputated. She had seen pictures of men and women who had lost limbs in accidents before, and this looked no different, aside from the Ichor tubing and artificial muscle running into her shoulder. With a soft smile, Will placed his fingers on her shoulder and walked them across her back.

"So that's where I start?" Jaime asked.  
"Not exactly," Will replied. "Your natural skin, yes. But ultimately, we had to go beneath and replace the shoulder joint, too. It wouldn't have held up to the forces the bionic arm can generate."  
"You know," Jaime said with a mixture of jovial and bitter, "that wouldn't be necessary if you guys had just built a normal-strength arm."  
"That's not what the military was interested in, though," Will sighed. "They wanted it as good as we could make it." He sat down behind her, and wrapped his arms around her as they both stared at her bionic arm's muscles moving. "Do you feel better now?"  
"A little," Jaime said. "I...I didn't know what to expect, really. But I imagined worse." She looked at it a little more. "I'm okay with it. But it's still not me."  
"Okay," Will said. "Now, come on. We've got to go to the lab to put your skin back on. Or, if you want, take the rest of it off."  
"I'd rather keep my skin, thank you," Jaime said.

---

"Hey, Becca! Here! Over here!" Kate shouted, wearing a too-bright-for-8-AM smile and waving her hand madly. Becca dragged the corners of her mouth upwards and navigated the assault course of unruly freshmen in the school bus, finally making her way to the rear where Kate and a slim handful of her other classmates had staked out their turf. Kate knew that the shouting part was completely unnecessary - in contrast to the waving, which was only mostly unnecessary - but it made for as good a display of cheerful spirit as any. Becca climbed into her seat, gave Kate a quick hug and then let the back of her head hit the headrest. After a second of blissful nothingness, she turned her head to Kate.

"Hey," Becca said.  
"Hey yourself, Becca," Kate said. "Woah, caught a bug? Don't get it on me."  
Becca turned her her and mock-coughed at Kate. Kate waved the air in front of her away and suppressed a small giggle.  
"No, I skipped breakfast," Becca said, "and sleep, kinda. So, uh, math homework?"  
"Yeah! It was actually kinda lame how easy it was, I mean, it's just the same thing five times..."  
"Can I see it?" Becca asked.  
"I got it right, Becca, no sweat," Kate said.  
"No, actually," Becca said, then paused and lowered her voice. "I need to copy it."  
Kate drew a sharp breath. "For serious? That's not the thing I wanna hear from my study buddy, Becca!"  
"I blame last night," Becca said, "I was gonna do it, but -"  
"Don't say a word more. Your super-double-secret project, right? You were in Mr. Merchant's office yesterday, walked out with another bag - it's elementary, Watson!"  
"Busted and guilty as charged," Becca replied. "My conscience is all heavy now. So, can I -"  
"Uh, sure, hang on -" Kate said, digging into her bag. With her head turned away, Becca couldn't read what she said next. "I know I put it here, you sure you're good to write on a bus?"  
"Thank you, Katie," Becca said simply. It seemed appropriate.  
"Yeah, no biggie," Kate said.

---

Jaime had spent a decent amount of the last days in the bionics lab; the sterile ambiance felt mundane already, and so Jaime was able to offer some constructive criticism when she laid down on the gurney.

"You know, I wouldn't mind a chair," she said. "More doctor, less ICU. And a few plastic flowers would be nice, I guess." Catching Will's credulous look, she added "This is a clean room, right? No real actual flowers, that would be bad. Unless it's actually cool with the tech, then I'm all for it."  
"Please hold still, Jaime," Will said. "I need to clean the skin."

He turned his back to her and scampered off to a far corner of the lab, where a large plastic-cased vessel stood. The 'glove' of skin went into it; Jaime's ear picked up a slight sloshing sound from inside the vessel and she sat upright to get a better look at the device. Will bowed down and manipulated a small touchscreen mounted to the apparatus beneath; within the second, the entire contraption started to vibrate, building into a high-frequency buzz that made the hairs on Jaime's neck stand up.  
"Ultrasonic cleaner, should be done in a few minutes," Will said, watching the tank do its work.  
"Uh huh," Jaime said. She started to poke and run her real hand along the muscles and Ichor tubing in the bionic arm, feeling the artificial fibers contract and release.  
"Don't poke the bionic arm, please," Will said, half-joking.  
"In a bit," Jaime said. "It's actually rather beautiful without the skin, in a really weird way."  
Will looked over his shoulder at her. "This from the woman who was having an existential crisis a half-hour ago about the bionics."  
"Yeah, but I didn't know...what it was, I guess. If it was me, or wasn't me. It looked like me, but all of a sudden I can do, see and hear things I couldn't before. It was a dream," she said, lifting her bionic arm up to the bright spotlights in the lab. "But now I know. I lost my arm, and my legs, and - I lost a lot, and they're all fakes now. It's not me. I don't like it, but I can deal with it."  
"I can understand that," Will said. "It was just -"  
"What?" Jaime asked. Her ear told her of footsteps closing the distance outside the lab, still far too soft to be heard by anyone else.  
"The way you...didn't seem to mind, at first," Will said. "I didn't build the bionics to remind people of their losses, Jaime. I built them so they could choose to improve themselves."  
"I didn't get a choice, Will."  
"I wish you had, Jaime," Will said with a weight on his heart. "I wish we all had." He turned away from Jaime, and a second later the airlock slid open.

Bledsoe walked into the lab, straight back and open eyes like he'd just slept for the exact length of time needed. "Good morning, Anthros, Miss Sommers. What exactly are you doing?"  
"There were some, um, irregularities with the synthetic skin, Sir," Will said. "Nothing serious."  
"I wanted to see what my new arm really looked like, that's all," Jaime said. "Thought it might help me deal with losing my real one."  
"Hmm," Bledsoe hummed. "Well, did it help?"  
"Yeah, it did."  
Bledsoe looks a little surprised. "That's good. Anthros, you look tired. Get yourself some coffee. Miss Sommers and I have something to discuss."  
"Yessir," Will said, then hurried past Bledsoe and out of the lab. The airlock cycled behind him, and Bledsoe turned to Jaime.  
"I've given the situation with the control systems some thought."  
"You mean your mind control devices," Jaime said. "That also, surprise!, almost killed me. Are we ready to tear it out now?"  
"I think there's an alternative solution we should consider."  
"Listen, Bledsoe, this isn't hard. I don't want to die. This crap is trying to kill me. It's **out**. I thought I was clear about that!"  
"It's not that simple," Bledsoe said. "The control systems are tied into the kinetic loop that handles your programmed reflexes and lets you move your limbs without hurting yourself."  
"Then get Ambrose to reprogram it. I'll be stuck in a wheelchair for a few days, so what?"  
"There is another option," Bledsoe said. "We turn over complete control of the mental control systems to you. You choose when to switch them on."  
"No," Jaime said. "No, I want -"  
"I know what you **want**, Miss Sommers," Bledsoe said. "We can't take them out, and I'm sorry about that, but that's how it is. Not all of the systems are as -"  
"Lethal?"  
"- overt as the panic control. Most of them are very subtle, and can help you. They are tools. You've spent two days in my world and you know that it's dangerous, Miss Sommers. For you, and for the people you love. You can't afford to just toss something that might be useful in the trash."

Jaime looked at Bledsoe, then back at her arm, thinking over what he just said.

"No," she said. "Some tools aren't worth it. You can go ahead with giving me control, but I won't use them. Same thing."  
Bledsoe nodded slightly. "Thank you for considering it, Miss Sommers. I've also looked into your headaches."  
"What about them?"  
"I've decided to give you two weeks off," Bledsoe said. "You're obviously having problems adjusting to the bionics. Your medical sensors show that you're still suffering from internal trauma from the accident, especially brain swelling - which is probably what's causing the headaches. Take the time and relax, Miss Sommers."  
"Uh, okay, sure," Jaime said. "Thank you...Jonas."  
Bledsoe smiled. "You're welcome. And don't call me that in front of anyone else, understood? It's destructive to morale."  
"And your image amongst the workers," Jaime said, and stretched. "It'll be nice to have the time off. Take care of myself, and Becca."  
"About that, Miss Sommers. Maybe you should reconsider her living with you," he said. "In the long run, it'll become harder to justify your absences and your actions. Terrorists don't work 9 to 5, and neither do we. I'm also concerned over her safety in a public school. We'll do our best to provide security, of course, but with the daily commute and her afternoon activities, it's a lot of ground to cover."  
"What are you talking about?"  
"A boarding school," Bledsoe said. "Find a good college prep that suits her, we'll take care of the admission and the tuition. Your sister would be much easier to protect if she's not in the line of fire."  
"No," Jaime said. "That's not an option. Becca stays with me."  
"The situation can only become more dangerous from here, Miss Sommers."  
"I don't care," Jaime said, shaking her head. "I'm not sending Becca off to some prep school. She stays here, with me. I can protect her." Jaime stood up from the table and started to advance on Bledsoe. "And if you ask me to choose between your mysterious little missions and my little sister, unless they're about to blow up the Transamerica Building, you can get Sage and the other guys to handle it. I will **not** let you come between me and her, _do you understand me?_"  
"Don't mistake my patience for weakness," Bledsoe said flatly. "If you tell me you can take care of the situation, I'll let you do your best. But I will stay on top of this, and if it turns out that you can't handle this, we're going to have to find a workable solution before someone targets her. Are we on the same page now?"

Jaime opened her mouth to reply, but the implications of Bledsoe's words were too strong to find words against. Stunned, she fell back and sat on the gurney.

"I hope you understand my point here, Miss Sommers," Bledsoe said. "I don't want anything to happen to your sister. And you need to think about how to best protect her."

Jaime didn't reply; Bledsoe sighed slowly, then turned and left the room, leaving her alone with her thoughts. After a moment, Jaime took a deep breath.

"I can protect her," Jaime said to herself. "I **will** protect her."

---

Math class passed without incident; the windup to class had given Becca the opportunity to go over Kate's solution in detail, equipping her with the ability to speak about the problem, if necessary. However, other people were called upon, laziness was exposed with no catastrophic consequences for the so afflicted, and by the end of the class Becca wasn't so sure whether having skipped this piece of homework was really worth all the anxiety of the morning.

"I told you I had it right," Kate said, and smiled. Becca smiled back, sincerely.

That left the usual suspects - biology, history, photography, none of which held Becca's interest that day - until she finally consciously realized that she was standing in line for lunch and had had half of the day float past her.

On the heels of that realization, she ordered the salad with her milkshake: nutritionally speaking, an empty gesture, but Becca wasn't too worried about her weight. Kate, right in line behind her, also went for the salad, but her choice of beverage was a bottle of mineral water. That was about par for the course, Becca thought, and sought out a table for the two of them in the corner of the hall that was near the large panorama windows. The somewhat cramped area's appeal was almost exclusively in its clear lines of sight to pretty much the entirety of the hall - and, well, the very occasional rays of sunshine making it past the thick crowns of the trees outside.

Kate sat down next to Becca and bumped her with her shoulder to get her attention. "So, tell me what the project is," she said.  
Becca grinned. "It wouldn't be super-double-secret if I told you, right?"  
"Come _on_," Kate said. "You're gonna tell me eventually, so you might as well get it over with now."  
Becca looked around, as if to make sure that nobody was watching or listening, then leaned over to Kate and whispered. "I'm building a robot."  
"Ooh, like one of those swashbot things? I thought how they wobbled around was so cute."  
"No, not like that," Becca said, "like something that can actually navigate by itself and take photos, and - uh, well, whatever else I can swing. I mean, I don't even have all the parts for the control system yet."  
Kate's eyes went wide. "_Nice_. How are you going to make it do that? That's, like, really advanced control and automation."  
"Yeah, no kidding," Becca said. "I've got this multi-chip ARM simulator and I think I have the architecture figured out, most of it anyway, but, uh, it doesn't scale to what I want to do. Keeps crashing on me, too much stuff going on for the VM to run properly on my netbook, and there's only so much component testing I can do with that before I need some actual metal to try it out on."  
"Well, that's what you get for downloading some hacked tool you found on Pirate Bay," Kate said, mouth full of salad.  
"Try it again without the mouthful of food," Becca said.  
Kate swallowed the half-chewed mass of veggies in one enormous gulp. "Whatever cheap VM knockoff you had probably couldn't run a vacuum cleaner."  
Becca nodded her understanding. "Actually, I got it from a guy at CalSci's robotics lab," she said sheepishly. "Still had to get a crack, though. Single-user license costs more than a freaking car."  
"You're breaking CalSci's simulators?" Kate said. "Uhh, wow."  
"Yeah, not really, but - well, kinda, I guess it's more a hardware limitation than software, but yeah." Becca replied. "Thanks for the 'Wow', anyway."  
"Yeah, sure, genius-girl," Kate said, and took another bite of her salad, taking care to swallow it first so her lips could be read. "So, how's that big brain of yours doing on that English report?"  
"I never should've told Jaime about it," Becca said. "I've got like three biographies on Wilde in my room right now. I told her, it's just an essay, not even the whole grade, but you let her get started and two hours later, she'll have you convinced 'The Importance of Being Earnest' is the best and deepest work of English fiction in, like, ever, except all the other books that take five hours to explain."  
"Sounds like someone **I** know," Kate said, smiling.  
"Hey!" Becca said.  
"Just remember, this isn't the math homework, you have to get it done the night before." Kate said. "Turnitin is a harsh mistress."  
"I know," Becca said. "I've been so stuffed with everything you could possibly want to know about the book, I'm more worried about accidentally just copying down something I've read -" Becca stopped mid-sentence, and stared out across the table, struck with an idea.  
"Uh, Becca?"  
"Holy crap," Becca said. "That might actually work."  
Kate had seen that look on Becca's face before. It usually preceded her running off very quickly. "You're just gonna leave now, aren't you," she said. Becca didn't see her speak, so Kate waved her hand in front of her friend's face and repeated herself when she got Becca's attention again. "You're gonna leave now, right?"  
"Gotta save the world, see ya later," Becca said, grabbed her bag and climbed out from behind the table, rushing off for the next door.  
"Wait, your lunch!" Kate shouted after her. But Becca wasn't looking at her, and that meant her message didn't stand a chance of delivery. After a second of frozen posture, Kate sat back down. "Save it for physics, Katie," Kate mumbled to herself. "No problem."

---

Jonas Bledsoe found the door of his office open and Antonio Pope already inside, still wearing his Army dress uniform. Bledsoe nodded to the soldier and walked behind his desk to fix himself a drink.

"I watched it," Pope said. "Little lax, don't you think, Mr. Bledsoe?"  
"She's a conscript, Pope," Bledsoe replied. "You have to make allowances for that. How'd it go with Colonel McCarthy?"  
"He's got files he shouldn't have and he's cheating on his wife."  
"Is he -"  
"Hard to say. My gut says no."  
"Good for him," Bledsoe said, taking a swig of clear liquor. The taste lingered on his tongue with a vague burning sensation following it, and he nodded approvingly. "Mmh. Still chasing that right bottle of _rouo de_. Doesn't taste quite right if it hasn't sat in grass. You want some?"  
"No, thank you," Pope said.  
"Suit yourself," Bledsoe said. "So, files he shouldn't have. Anything interesting there?"  
"Actually, yes. I found another autopsy report for Corvus. Looked off to me, so on the flight back I checked the one we got. Ours has all five GSWs, the one in McCarthy's files only has four and they're not in the same places. References to bionics were redacted, of course, but they looked to match the text in ours."  
"Interesting. And the rest is the same?"  
"No mention of ID tests, either - dental, prints, DNA, nothing."  
"Alright," Bledsoe said. "Eyes on McCarthy, then. Might not be our man, but someone around him could be. And we need copies of everyone's Corvus autopsy. If there's more than one version, we could track tampering by who has what and checking it against the official distribution list."  
"That'll put everyone on edge, though," Pope replied. "You're asking the liar for proof he's lying - they'll just give you the 'right' version of the report."  
"It's a long shot," Bledsoe admitted. "But there's always snitches and screw-ups, Pope. You squeeze hard and long enough, sooner or later something's gotta give. And then we'll have our leak."

---

All things considered, bumming a ride home from Will was better than getting one from Bledsoe. It was 2 PM by the time the pair reentered San Francisco, and dinner plans were made - a safe topic of conversation, though not particularly time-filling. Her conversation with Bledsoe was still rolling around in her head, and Jaime hadn't yet come up with a better way to start a dialogue when Will's car rolled up on her home.

"See you, Jaime," Will said. He'd gotten fairly good at brave faces in a short time.  
"Love you," Jaime replied. There was some magic to those words: it turned Will's smile honest and lightened Jaime's expression, too. She kissed him through the lowered window of his car, a brief taste of his lips with the idling engine in her ear.

Will's car did the opposite of speeding away, while Jaime waved and smiled at him until he rounded the corner and took off. With him gone, Jaime's next thought went out to Becca; she pulled out her private cellphone, selected Becca from her (short) list of contacts and started typing out a short message.

'Picking you up'  
'Really? Not 2 busy?' Becca's reply was quick, and Jaime could hear the tone in her voice even through the text.  
'Sorry! ice cream?'  
'Better than ice cream ( '  
'Ice cream + shopping? :) '  
'Whatever pick me up after class'  
'Okay love you!'  
'Yeah okay bye'

Jaime switched her phone back to standby and stashed it. Out of reflex, she reached for her wallet and checked it. There were about 37 dollars in cash in there, not exactly enough for a shopping spree, but then she pulled out the debit card Bledsoe had given her. She looked at it, and thought about what he had said earlier. _Fuck you, Jonas Bledsoe,_ she thought, and pulled out her cell phone again.

'Lets drain that debit card'  
'Really?'  
'Really'

For a few seconds, there was silence in the ether. Then, Becca's reply came in.

'Hmm okay later'

Jaime thought about writing another reply, but she knew when to push Becca to open up, and when to just leave her alone, and right then, the best thing she could do was to just wait and try to talk to her when she picked her up. With that in mind, she climbed into her car, started the engine and practiced her speech to Becca.  
"Hey," Jaime said to herself. "I'm sorry for running out on you yesterday, and the day before. I left you...I left you..." She hit the steering wheel. "Damn."

---

Jaime pulled up in front of Becca's high school. Becca was sitting at her usual spot by the school's sign, looking at the ground in front of her, resolutely ignoring anything other than her phone. Jaime pulled her car to a stop in front of her at the curb and waited for a moment. Becca still didn't look up, being that she was more focused on reading her cell phone's screen than looking for Jaime. Jaime grabbed her own phone and texted Becca again.

'Right in front of you lets go'  
'I know still mad'  
'Then come in lets talk'

Jaime looked up at Becca. When Becca received the text message, she sighed, and looked up at Jaime, who smiled at her little sister. Becca simply shook her head and got in the car.

"So..." Jaime asked.  
Becca looked at Jaime in the rear view mirror. "Let's just go," she said.  
"I'm really sorry, Becca, about leaving you last night, and the night before."  
Becca turned and looked out of the window, staring at the trees in front of the school. "Becca..." Jaime mumbled helplessly. Her hands tightened around the steering wheel, and after a quick check that all windows were closed, Jaime screamed as loud as she could. A few kids walking past the car looked at her, but she ignored them. After a second to catch her breath and regain her composure, she put her hand on Becca's shoulder.  
"I'm not talking to you," Becca said. She threw a slight glance behind her, and when she caught a glimpse of her big sister's face, eyes red and jaw clenched in pain, her expression softened.  
"Jaime?" Becca asked quietly. "What's - I, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. I'm sorry."

Jaime managed a smile, and Becca tried to join in. Jaime couldn't hold herself back any longer, and wrapped her arms around her little sister. The two hug for a moment, then Jaime pulls back. "It's okay. So, you want to talk?"  
"Not right now," Becca says. "I - I'm not ready yet."  
"Okay," Jaime said. "So...ice cream?"  
Becca pauses. "I don't -"  
"You don't actually get a choice here," Jaime said with a brief grin, "because I'm getting some. And after that, how do you feel about getting back at my new boss and spending a lot of his money?"  
"What is 'a lot'?" Becca asked. "How much spendage are we talking here?"  
"Well, what do you want to buy?" Jaime asked. "Besides a car," she quickly added.  
"I have a list," Becca said, pulled out a notebook and handed it to Jaime.  
"You've been waiting for this," Jaime said, skimming the list. "Does this computer really need four of these Tesla things? What's this for, anyway?"  
"It's so I can run simulations on the code and motion of the robot."  
"Oh, the robot," Jaime mumbled.  
"It doesn't really _have_ to have four of them, but..." Becca said, smiling.  
"Two, Becca."  
"Three?"  
"No, two. We can get more if you need them."  
Becca managed to look disappointed for about a second before she lunged across the car and hugged Jaime. "Thank you, thank you, thank you!"  
Jaime returned the hug. When Becca let go, she smiled.  
"Also, those two crazy nights?" Jaime said. "I got the next two weeks off. We can do whatever you want."  
"I've always wanted an evil lab assistant," Becca said, smile growing on her face.  
"You got it," Jaime said. "Let's go!"

----

Sara Corvus was on the hunt again.

After a whole night of trying to get anything useful out of the strange surveillance device she'd extracted from beneath Jaime's car, Corvus was about ready for something basic again. Without the tracker, following Jaime Sommers was a matter of driving behind her car at a distance, keeping her moves subtle and her pursuit unobtrusive. A nice change of pace, but too mindless to keep Corvus's thoughts at bay.

Her thoughts circled around the surveillance device like planets around a star, inevitably drawn closer by the weight of the idea. It wasn't one of hers, it wasn't Berkut, in fact it didn't match any bug Corvus had ever seen in use. Whoever had gotten it into position had done so without being noticed by Jaime, Berkut's men or even Corvus's own accomplices, and that spoke to a significant amount of skill.

Another side. As if the game wasn't already complicated enough.

_You're in a war you didn't ask for, Sommers. Everybody wants a piece of you, but you can't spare any more, can you? Can you fight the whole world?_

Corvus followed Jaime's car to a school, pulling in to park a few seconds after Jaime executed the same maneuver a hundred feet ahead. The buzz from other students being picked up by their parents masked Corvus's presence well. Just another car, sitting there, waiting. Eventually, Jaime pulled out of the parking spot and drove away. Corvus followed. The viewing angle hadn't been good enough to see who Jaime had picked up, so Corvus wondered about that through the next three turns. A kid? Corvus dismissed the thought; she didn't figure Jaime for the type to already have a high school-age kid. A younger sibling, maybe. That sounded plausible enough.

_You can't tell anyone, Sommers. Only you get to see the monster in the mirror. Stick to the routine. Wear the old skin. Hide what they made you into._

Half an hour later, Corvus had her theory confirmed. Jaime's SUV pulled into the parking lot of a Fry's Electronics box-store. Corvus's face showed a bemused smirk as her car rolled past, slow enough to give her a look at Jaime. A young girl - 15? 16? - climbed out of the passenger's side of Jaime's car. Corvus's eyes took a dozen high-resolution pictures of her, squirreling them away for later analysis. Corvus found an empty spot some distance away, parked her car and waited.

Throughout the next few minutes, Corvus occasionally looked around her, trying to spot the Berkut vehicle tailing Jaime's car, but finally gave up and concluded there was none. That made her current job easier but her overall mission harder: if the surveillance on Jaime was through her implants, getting her secluded and away from Jonas Bledsoe's watchful eyes would be much harder. Corvus's thoughts leaped at that: what kind of signal did they use? Where and how could it be neutralized? There had to be a way, somehow.

_You're on a leash, like a dog. They take you apart and turn you into a doll, a fake plastic monster. You ever look behind you and just want to run, Sommers? I'd run if I were you. Run faster than they can follow you. It's the only way you'll ever get to live._

Jaime and her - sister? - took a long time to shop, and for a while Corvus considered that they'd noticed her and called reinforcements on her, taking shelter inside. The feeling only vanished when they walked back out of the store with a full shopping cart. Corvus reached for a pair of binoculars to augment the natural zoom of her bionic eyes; with the additional magnification, she could read some of the labels poking out of the large plastic bags. Ethereal boxes popped into her vision as her system deciphered the barcodes, giving her a glimpse of the items bought.

_Batteries, sensors and - a 5000 dollar GPGPU system?_

Corvus didn't know what exactly **that** was, but she surmised that it wasn't exactly a video game accessory. She resolved to find out more about Jaime's companion; this was proving to be a little more interesting than she'd thought. With a swipe of her hand, she detached a small flap of smartskin behind her ear. Spanning a cable from the plug installed there to her cellphone was a well-practiced, if still tiresome move. With a few key taps, she pulled one of the pictures of the teenager out of her internal storage and sent it to Nicholas, her closest ally. After the phone beeped out the completion of that task, she followed it up with a text message.

'Associate sommers need id'

---

Staggering through the front door, Becca dropped the last two bags of clothing in the sizable pile of loot taking up half of the living room floor, and Jaime followed shortly behind, carrying the cardboard box containing Becca's shiny new supercomputer. The box was placed carefully next to the kitchen counter, and Jaime took a seat on the sofa. Becca collapsed on top of her big sister, laying across her lap.

"That was **so** much fun," Becca said, and propped herself up so she could see Jaime's face.  
"Oof, my legs," Jaime protested. "I think you broke them."  
"Then I guess you'll just have to sit here," Becca said, "because I'm way too tired to move."  
"Fine," Jaime said, "it's not like I can get up, anyway. That thing really weighs, like, five grand."  
"Why do you think I volunteered to take the last of your clothes in?" Becca asked, grinning mischievously.  
"I bow before the brilliance of your scheme," Jaime said, and bows as much as her sister's body will let her. "So, what's the plan now? We have two weeks all to ourselves, all the time in the world to get in trouble with."  
"I'm sure we'll think of something," Becca said, and rolled off Jaime's legs onto the floor. She sat up, her back against the table. "What about after that, though?"  
Jaime's expression grew slightly more serious. "I'm back on call. When the vacation is over, you go back to work." She tried to crack a grin. "That's how adult life works."  
"Yeah, but...what about breakfast?" Becca asked, drawing a circle in the carpet. "What if you're not there in the mornings ever again?"  
"I will be there almost every morning, I promise. And no more running out in the middle of the night without telling you. It was just two days, Becca."  
Becca stood up. "Your first two days with this new job," she shoots back. "You're just going to ditch me more and more, and then I'll never see you again, you're just going to leave me for this stupid job!"  
"No!" Jaime insisted. "Becca, I'm **not** going to leave you behind, ever. I would **never** do that."  
"Oh, yeah? You left me at school, you left in the middle of the night, you weren't there in the morning, ever since you got this job, all you've _been_ doing is leaving me behind!"  
"I - I didn't want to, but I didn't have a choice!" Jaime said, feeling her chest tighten.  
"Of course you did!" Becca shouted, tears running down her cheeks. "We were doing fine before, just fine, and now you only see me when you sneak out in the middle of the night!"  
Jaime's vision blurred with tears of her own. "Becca, I - I -"  
"What's this Bledsoe person have you do that's so important, anyway?" Becca yelled, and wiped her eyes.  
"I...I can't tell you," Jaime said. "It's really important, and that's all I can say."  
Becca froze, her mouth hanging open from shock. "I can't believe this," she said, turning around. "I can't believe you would lie to me! Why would you lie to me like that! Just tell me, tell me what's worth abandoning me for!" She turned back around, and saw Jaime holding her face in her hands. "Huh?"

Jaime drew her hands off her face and looked up at Becca, unable to speak. She didn't need to. Becca could read every word of it off her face. Her face was soaked with tears, one eye bloodshot from crying, and her lips trembled as her big sister tried to hold herself together. "I...I can't..." she said, and Becca could see every bit of pain saying that sentence caused her. The helplessness. The desperation.

But above everything else Becca saw, there was the fear. Raw, naked, complete terror. In that moment, Becca knew that whatever this new job was, it scared the living daylights out of Jaime.

"Just...go," Jaime whimpered. "Go away. Get away from me."

Anyone else and Becca would have turned away and done just that. She was looking at a trainwreck of her own making, and the most basic instinct was to gain distance, to get away, give her what she wanted and hope this would all blow over. Go somewhere safe, breath it out, calm down.

Anyone else. But not her sister.

Becca knelt down in front of Jaime. "No," she said, fighting her throat for every word. "It's okay. I trust you, sis. I believe you. It's gonna be okay."  
"Becca -" Jaime choked out.  
"I'm sorry," Becca said, and embraced her. "It's gonna be okay, I promise."  
Jaime nodded. "It's gonna be okay," she sniffled.

As they held each other, the fresh memory of Jaime's terrified face burned itself into Becca's thoughts.  
_What is it, Jaime?_ Becca thought. _What's going on? You can't tell me, but I can find out. I __**have**__ to find out._

---

The most tiring part of any storm was always the cleanup afterwards, the period where you stood before a mountain of rubble already exhausted from the fight. Slowly, over the next few hours, Becca and Jaime climbed out of the hole, exchanging more apologies and cheering each other up, squirreling away their respective purchases in their rooms and preparing for dinner. When Will finally arrived, Becca was too tired to clash with him, never mind upsetting her big sister again; she ate and nodded politely to a conversation free of substantial content. After dinner, Becca politely excused herself. Jaime was clearly preoccupied with seeking solace from Will, and Becca swallowed the small feeling in her throat, knowing that she would have to get used to not having Jaime's affection all to herself.

It was an upsetting experience in all, and so she walked straight past the shiny new hardware. Her utopical wish list, now essentially fulfilled, seemed like a mere consolation price. What kept her together was the nastier part of her brain, negative emotions honing in on a previous target: Jonas Bledsoe. After all, the man was responsible for the troubles with her sister, right? It wouldn't do to just give up after a single night. Not when she still had a few aces up her sleeve.

What made the visit to Turnitin embarrassing was that Becca had already bookmarked it for the English class assignments. She logged in, browsed her submissions for an open assignment, and opened it.

Finding a copy of the Bledsoe interview in her browser history was easy. Pasting it into the submission form at the Turnitin website was easy. Waiting for the website to trawl its database was hard. Fortunately, the server load was light, and within a few minutes, the results came back in.

'Her' text lit up like a Christmas tree.

Becca's reflex reaction was to shout and pump her fist, pat herself on the back for cracking another tough nut. But after a few moments of thought, the urge disappeared rapidly. What _had_ she just proved? She thought of Jaime's face. She thought of what it would take to seed fake articles all over the net. The thought wasn't comforting. All she had was a collection of magazine articles, a mere annoyance against someone with enough connections to create an entirely fake life for this 'Jonas Bledsoe'.

First things first: Becca had to clean up after herself. She removed the interview text from her submissions and replaced it with her proper essay again; after seeing it safely submitted to regain its real rating, Becca closed the browser tab, which left her with the interview - and a photo of Jonas Bledsoe donning a slight smile for the camera.

"Who _are_ you?" Becca asked.


End file.
